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MizPiz posted:My understanding is that everyone's* most recent common ancestor lived between 300 BCE and 50 CE. There actually are two humans that absolutely all of us are descendants of. They probably didn't know each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam We're talking 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, generally; possibly 300,0000 years ago in case of Adam there.
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Feb 24, 2016 17:16
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Fart jokes are eternal. As long as there exists both farting and jokes there will be fart jokes. I take comfort in that fact.
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Feb 24, 2016 20:11
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MisterBibs posted:Bit of a crosspost from something I asked in the Funny Pictures thread; a request if I'm remembering right or not. I tried doing some googling, and all I got were gifs and "who would win" forum discussions. If memory serves the quality of the katana depended on the particular folding technique used; some of them were hard to do properly but it also wasn't exactly magical samurai ingenuity; it was a practical concern. Iron was hard to come by in Japan at the time and their smelting techniques didn't produce consistent results when they made steel. Using the hardest steel and nothing else produced a lovely sword but if you layered multiple hardnesses or carbon contents over each other you could get a razor sharp edge and a tougher blade. One of the reasons they were different had to do with how different warfare was in Japan when compared to, say, Europe. Europe was basically drowning in coal and iron so "let's make steel EVERYTHING" wasn't a stretch. Japan was quite different so they didn't have plated armor or huge mail coats like European war had. If memory serves armor in Japan was mostly made of bamboo and leather; nobles could afford most of a metal breastplate, a steel helmet, and some scaled/lammelar armor but basically never a full suit of metal. They also wore lighter armor compared to Europe. The construction of a katana was done the way it was because fighting was quicker in Japan. Whoever managed to strike first usually won and you were expected to make your first strike a death blow. A katana wasn't expected to be used more than a few times. Samurai were also...kind of odd in Japanese war. Like Europe most of the actual fighting was done by peasants with pointy stick weapons. Samurai were expected to seek each other out in combat and, if they bothered to interact with common soldiers, did it from horseback with pole weapons. Fighting with a katana was an exceptional thing; the idea that they were war-winning swords is a weird romantic ideal people came up with later. Samurai being super honorable nobles was also mostly bullshit. These were a caste of dudes above everybody else that were prone to murdering peasants just because they felt like it. Kind of a tangent and not a fun fact, though. Well it's fun to use to piss off weeaboos. Actually that does make me think of a fun fact about Japanese warfare. There were a few guys that went down in time because they were, in fact, super duper honorable. At one point there were salt and rice boycotts against a particular region intended to gently caress them up. This caused food problems for more than just the soldiery. Uesugi Kenshin arranged secret gifts and supplies to the area, later saying "wars are to be won with swords and spears, not with rice and salt" while setting a precedent among Japanese war that lasted for a while. This was also a huge deal because some of the people affected by the blockade were followers of his rival at the time, Takeda Shingen. He instructed that food supplies should be sold to merchants that would go to the area and that they were forbidden from excessive profiteering; the price should be standard. He wrote Shingen and said stuff to the effect of "your people are suffering and others are doing this on purpose. This poo poo ain't cool, have some supplies. There are no ulterior motives; this is not your peoples' fault and they shouldn't be punished."
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Feb 27, 2016 04:18
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The other thing to notice there is what happens to the cutting edges of both blades. Weapons colliding in that way in a real fight was rare; you absolutely did not want to gently caress up your weapon without a good reason. You didn't block things with the bladed edge of anything if you could help it.
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Feb 27, 2016 21:37
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Perestroika posted:That's... not really supported by anything. There are a pretty significant number of surviving fencing treatises from the middle ages (Nice collection in this wiki: http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Nuremberg_Group) concerning how to fight with the sword, and pretty much all of them include edge-to-edge parrying and binding as a completely central aspect. Fencing was primarily done using weapons more geared toward thrusting than slashing. Some could do both (and of course saber fighting was entirely slashing) but even so a parry with a fencing weapon was less "bash weapons together" and more "redirect the blow." Even then you'd prefer to use the flat of a blade rather than the edge of one. You wouldn't likely break the weapon but you'd dull or notch it, which you didn't generally want to have happen. Fencing is also very different from the sword and board fighting that you'd see on a battlefield.
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Feb 27, 2016 22:24
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Pretty sure a lot of contemporary paganism in the western world is just plain descended from Wicca, which is literally a made up religion that a guy fabricated in the 1950's. He claimed he was talking to people who had been practicing magic in secret but that turned out to be bullshit.If memory serves it was 100% provably bullshit. Other parts of contemporary paganism are based on concepts that ancient religions had rather than direct lines from them. Other parts are...well, literally crazy people just being crazy and believing they're wizards that talk to faeries. In the case of ancient druids their histories and religions were generally passed down orally. There just weren't written records so once the Romans started to kick their faces in there was little chance of it surviving. If memory serves druids were generally also leaders of various types, which got them targeted something fierce. When they died their histories died with them.
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Feb 28, 2016 06:56
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Sucrose posted:Didn't a lot of the formation of Wicca rest on the theory that various people accused of witchcraft in earlier eras were really secret pagans passing down their knowledge from the old days? Which is complete BS. Yeah a great deal of it rests on people managing to practice a religion completely in secret for over a thousand years which never, ever changed once. The claims the guy makes about its foundings are utterly absurd. A lot of Wicca is based on the theories of one Margaret Murray. A lot of it hinges on witch trials not being bullshit which they frequently were and also witch trials and witch burning being very common, which they weren't. It also hinges on witch trials being entirely truthful which, again, they often weren't. There just isn't evidence existing at all that witchy pagan religions were even practiced let alone persecuted. People that studied witch trials for a living went "yeah this is bullshit" and before too long completely tore the argument to shreds. A big snag is the assumption that witch trials were a perpetual threat to witchcraft for its entire existence. Centuries where witch trials happened at all were an exception rather than a rule in the history of Christianity. Given that Wicca argues that this is literally its origin story doesn't speak well of the religion. Even the things that can't be proven false are also impossible to prove true. It is possible, though improbable, that witch cults did exist in secret though again very little evidence has been found of such things. More importantly if they were hidden, small, and had been actively hunted it was very unlikely they would be unchanged for 1,000 to 2,000 years. Religions as a whole are prone to changing, schisming, and reorganizing all the drat time. There is absolutely no way that ancient traditions were preserved exactly the way they were for that long.
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Mar 1, 2016 12:38
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Tias posted:No religion does, though, which I why I don't think it speaks particularly ill of Wicca as a religion. What are they doing that christianity or buddhism isn't? Buddhism and Christianity have provable historic precedent as do other religions. Wicca does not. In fact what precedent Wicca claims to have is proven to be bullshit. This doesn't invalidate Wicca as it is practiced now; the problem is that claiming as fact something that has been proven to be nonsense is stupid. It can claim to be modern paganism. Fine, whatever, it is. It cannot claim to be an ancient religion that can trace its roots back 3,000 years.
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Mar 1, 2016 12:48
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zedprime posted:Historical fun fact: "hermetic order" is a fancy name for a swinger's club that scams money off people who believe in magic. For example, JPL founding member and (in)famous rocket scientist Jack Parsons was taken for a ride by the Ordo Templi Orientis. He lost a load of money with tithes to Aleister Crowely in the dying days of the OTO, and more locally to his temple (AKA his house), lost a lover or two and more cash to none other than L Ron Hubbard. It's also worth noting that Gardner was a Rosicrucian before creating Wicca and generally didn't have a good opinion of hermetic orders. He thought they were mostly stupid, bureaucratic cults run by jerks who just wanted to control people. I don't give a poo poo if people want to practice Wicca but boy howdy does it get frustrating explaining that their origin story is completely bogus. It also doesn't help that 90% of the contemporary pagans I've met have been self-absorbed white people who have a shallow understanding of paganism and only practice it to be a special, unique, rebellious snowflake whose religions is TOTALLY OLDER THAN YOURS, gently caress YOU DAD.
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Mar 1, 2016 20:06
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Tiggum posted:You mean these ones? No, there are a lot of things that don't have them. For example, I like canned beets a lot but always have to break out the can opener to have some.
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Mar 3, 2016 03:34
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Fun facts about concrete! You've seen concrete. Seriously, poo poo is everywhere. It's one of the most useful building materials in existence and is the most used man-made material in the world. Use of concrete predates the Roman empire, possibly by thousands of years. Ancient people figured out concrete a loooooong drat time ago; Rome used the hell out of it. You'd think that something so drat useful would stick around but it kind of didn't. After Rome fell most people just plain didn't know about concrete let alone use it; the techniques were mostly lost and unused. In a few places concrete stuck around but all told its use was rare until around the 18th century. Then people went "holy gently caress balls this poo poo is incredible!" and its use exploded again. Interestingly cement, concrete, grout and the like tend to be made of various combinations of alumina and silica, which also happen to be the primary ingredients of clay. Ceramic materials also, of course, have a long, interesting history. A lot of that is shrouded in mystery; making ceramics predates writing.
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Mar 5, 2016 09:54
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Alhazred posted:Somehow Ivan the Terrible doesn't strike me as the type of person that would regret killing anyone, let alone his son. If memory serves part of his reaction wasn't necessarily that he had killed his son but rather that he realized he ultimately destroyed his legacy in the process. Ivan the son was supposed to take the throne on Ivan the Terrible's death; the only other possible heir at the time was who ultimately ended up getting the throne. Feodor I was....let's just say a simple man. He was frail and probably a bit mentally retarded. He died relatively young and childless, which caused some nasty problems. He didn't have much interest in politics either which tends to lead to other ambitious people seeking to take his power for their own. Ivan and Ivan got along pretty well up until around that point. Then Ivan smacked a young lady around for being immodest, Ivan the son didn't like it much, they argued, and Ivan the Terrible bashed him no the head with his metal-studded cane, which gave Ivan the son a horrendous head wound that ultimately killed him slowly. Ivan the Terrible realized that he made a grievous error but couldn't do much to take it back.
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Mar 21, 2016 21:01
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Elyv posted:I'm not sure on the prediction of future events, but yes, he was basically forced into retirement by the Kaiser, whose people promptly spent the next 30-40 years turning a political situation where they were friendly with Russia and Austria and basically neutral with Britain to one where they were close allies with Austria-Hungary and hostile with Britain and Russia (who had previously been involved in the Great Game with each other in Central Asia). Well done, guys! Some people just really, really want to pick fights. Which is, incidentally, one of the reasons WW1 happened at all. A looooot of people just wanted an excuse to hammer on their neighbors for a variety of reasons. Some were a history of animosity, others were just "they have land and we want more land let's go crack some heads." Imperialism was still A Thing at that point. This was one of the reasons everything was so diplomatically precarious; everybody in Europe basically knew that a massive poo poo gently caress show of a war could be kicked off by a pin drop nanoseconds after the carefully cultivated network of alliances shifted in anybody's favor. Then it turned out that instead of glorious conquests, expanding empires, and a return to cool and awesome ambitions of the colonial era they got World War I instead. Whoops!
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Mar 21, 2016 22:38
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tacodaemon posted:I was always struck that there are no fewer than three different dudes in that tree who were like "yeah it would be politically advantageous to nail my sister's daughter" and European nobility was such that they were apparently right about that When you end up with massive amounts of land and wealth being attached to lineage who you hump matters a great deal. Nobody really knew a ton about genetics at the time so it's reasonable to assume that many people just plain didn't know that inbreeding that badly was a problem. It's also likely that if they did they didn't consider long term problems that would come from it because right now we can keep our massive holdings by not marring out of this particular pool of lineage. There was also pressure to marry as high as you could which ended up with people high up on the nobility chain marrying cousins all the time simply because nobody else was available. Then there were the alliances, etc. The choice was either gently caress your family or be at risk of losing wealth, land, and status.
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Mar 22, 2016 13:47
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The really interesting thing about Charles II's family (he was a Habsburg, by the way...or Hapsburg, depending on who you ask) is that the "Hapsburg Lip" that his jaw showed was considered a sign of the family. It was however the result of many generations of inbreeding. Nobody else really had it but it was a very pronounced underbite as well as a deformity of the jaw. Charles II wasn't even able to chew his food his was so bad. When he died the doctor that examined his corpse was all like "what the everloving gently caress? How was this guy even alive?" he was so hosed up. You can actually Google it and find pictures of other Hapsburgs that had the same poo poo going on just not quite as severely. It was considered a mark of pride to have that jaw line despite the difficulties it caused. This is also possibly why it is so pronounced in Charles II's portraits; you could look at the guy and say "yup, Hapsburg" based on the jaw line alone. The Hapsburgs were also around for like 500 years and controlled almost every title that was "Emperor" or "King" in Europe at one point or another. The house ended up becoming absurdly powerful but wanted to maintain that so they tried to...uh...keep it in the family... in more ways than one. In the short term their political marriages dramatically increased, and then maintained, their wealth and influence but then ultimately ruined them as they began to produce seriously inbred idiot kings.
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Mar 23, 2016 22:39
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The really great thing about that stone is that "people have records of this fucker for 1,000 years" is suddenly more than enough reason to keep track of it. It's just plain neat to see something that has that much history behind it even it's just a boring ol' rock.
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Mar 24, 2016 01:23
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nimby posted:Makes you wonder why Romans went into politics. So much plotting, intrigue and mass murder of entire families. Wealth and power, mostly. Which is, incidentally, also why so much murder tended to happen. Some dudes are threatening to take away your wealth and power? They can't do that if you exterminate their entire bloodline, now can they?
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Mar 30, 2016 19:36
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I think at least two of those people are Kevin Bacon. How else does he manage to star in more movies than have ever been made?
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Apr 4, 2016 14:38
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coronatae posted:Wasn't Edward VI also a really sickly child or did I make that up out of one of my "Princess Elizabeth" historical ya novels He was. That was part of why Henry VIII was so dead set on keeping him safe and alive while making another male babby. You know, a backup just in case the worst happened. Which it did. Henry of course died in 1547 when Edward was 9. He died at 15; the years he "ruled" were mostly run by a regency council. He wasn't well in general but got very, very sick and died pretty young. He named Lady Jane Grey as successor. The problem there was who was "supposed" to succeed was one of his half-siblings. She was also quite young at the time; just a teenager. She ruled for like two weeks before the council and the more legally legitimate heir Mary deposed her, charged her with high treason, and sentenced her to death. She was initially spared but then her and her husband were later killed during more social unrest and rebellions. History exonerated her but was not kind to Mary. poo poo sucked in England at the time. Henry VIII's religious fuckery made a lot of people very unhappy. The child king and political ambitions abounding seriously goobered up the works. The war with Scotland didn't help nor did the financial fuckery Henry VIII got up to. Mary I didn't last long either; she tried to force the nation back into Catholicism and came down on Protestants hard. Mary of course also didn't last very long and had at least one false pregnancy. She badly wanted to have a child to remove Elizabeth from the line of succession and kept trying to make her husband (Philip II of Spain) the de facto ruler. She failed of course which led to Elizabeth I being queen. Mary probably died of a mix of cancer and influenza. Fun fact about Elizabeth I: she wanted to be really pale so she caked her face in white makeup. At the time this contained lead which hosed her up something fierce. So she responded with more white makeup. Eventually this caused her hair to fall out and she became...less than desirable. This is sometimes assumed to be part of why she put the idea of marrying out of her mind later in life. Despite this she lived to be nearly 70 and was, all told, a far, far better ruler than the few people who came before her. In any event when she was old and ravaged she banned mirrors from the palace.
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Apr 14, 2016 03:30
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RagnarokAngel posted:I'm pretty sure it's accepted she was afraid any man she married would basically control the throne and push her into irrelevance. Considering how royal politics tend to work she probably wasn't off. Historians don't have a 100% nailed down reason but there are suggestions that it was mostly political. A gently caress load of people had a lot to gain for themselves and their houses during the time of political turmoil that the century was in England by marrying the queen. She was probably very worried that whoever she married would push her out of power and into irrelevance because he was king and she was not. There was also the potential for massive political upheaval if she picked the wrong husband. The interesting thing about her remaining unmarried was that it created a situation where the options were still open. If she married options became closed which guaranteed that people who could no longer gain by marrying her/having a relative marry her would very likely get pissed off and raise arms. If memory serves there were actually multiple times that she headed off political problems by suggesting that she might maybe, I don't know, perhaps possibly some day marry some dude from some particular house that had political ambitions. When the storm passed she'd lose interest. She had a poo poo load of marriage offers but as history shows never actually took any of them. It's also quite possible that she knew she was infertile as it's suggested that she had at least one lover along the way but again there's a ton of uncertainty on the details. Royal marriages were pretty much always political at the time and there was no way she could get away from the politics of marrying or not marrying. It turned out in her case that not marrying anybody ever was a good political move. For decades people were trying to be That Guy that Married the Queen and failing which helped create some stability. Of course her getting married and pumping out an heir or two would also have ramifications within her now completely disinherited extended family. With no heir of her own it ended up going to James I (who was also James VI of Scotland) fairly smoothly with little major fanfare. Of course the political fuckery that had been going on for like a century at that point led to him dealing with nasty, nasty plots pretty much immediately. edit: I'm a dumbass he was James VI not James IV. ToxicSlurpee has a new favorite as of 22:29 on Apr 14, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 22:26
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:From what I recall the crusaders kind of sucked at conquering. The Mongols however, were really good at it. The crusades were also kind of a lovely thing to do because the Muslims controlling the area at the time didn't really care if Christians wanted to visit Jerusalem. For the most part Christians were a largely ignored minority in the area, as were the Jews. Pilgrims were welcome to come in whatever numbers they wanted so long as they didn't cause problems. Non-Muslims could live in the area and get mostly left alone. Merchants could do their thing too. For a while this was fine until Urban II decided that this was like "making a deal with the devil" and just not OK. It was also tied into some problems the Byzantines were having and asking for support for. The Crusades were, as a whole, poorly organized, badly executed, and severely under supplied. They were full of zeal and fanaticism but it turns out those things don't win wars. This of course made the Muslims pretty unhappy with much of Europe; this animosity between the two religions is part of why Islamic ideas didn't spread. One theory is that the Italian Renaissance would have been completely unnecessary if Christendom just let Muslim science spread but like the Nazis and Jewish science they just said "gently caress you we'll do this our way!" Only it turns out that math never changes so you can't just do it "your way."
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Apr 15, 2016 17:11
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RagnarokAngel posted:I'm not defending the crusades, because they were lovely, but it's also kinda white washy to paint the Muslims as the unabashed good guys in all of this. I know, I was talking about that particular slice of history; the crusades were politically complex and not 100% religiously motivated. A lot of Europe's ideals also depended on who was ruling and who was Pope. Some popes were like "HELL YEAH LET'S HOLY WAR EVERYTHING!" and others were like "nah just let those guys do their thing over there." It was a very long piece of history covering several centuries. Trying to talk in generalities at all is impossible; really I was referring to the area in and around Jerusalem and what have you. My understanding was that the Muslims in that particular area just kind of shrugged and went "meh, whatever" when Christians showed up.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:09
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If memory serves the people that just rolled over and said "OK Genghis, you own us now" didn't do so bad so long as they kept paying the tribute and were OK with being looted. The peoples that resisted got hosed up something fierce and the loving up increased the harder they resisted. The Mongols were also, you know, the Mongols and would sometimes burn down your kingdom for no other reason than "yeah gently caress you, dude."
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Apr 16, 2016 00:07
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Carbon dioxide posted:Aren't magnetic tapes commonly used by large internet companies for data backups, because while they're slow as hell, they last way way longer than discs of any kind, and are a relatively compact way of storing data? I think Google has these huge warehoused of tapes with robots automatically loading/unloading them into a data recorder. There are still places that use stuff like vacuum tubes and whatever for various reasons too. But yeah, magentic tape backup is absurdly reliable until the tape starts to fall apart. I'm pretty sure tape is also pretty cheap. It's stupidly slow but for data on the level of "we absolutely must keep a copy of this in existence" having a tape backup or two is pretty much foolproof. You have to deliberately sabotage it to gently caress up a tape backup if you're using it right. Just swap the tapes out when they get to the end of their lifespan and it's effectively a perfect backup. Reading it is slower than reading a hard drive but you know. The other thing is that if you physically damage part of a CD or a harddrive you've probably hosed the whole thing irrevocably. If you damage a physical part of a tape you can generally read the rest of it. I think so, at least.
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Apr 30, 2016 09:52
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LostCosmonaut posted:Hitler's entire racial policy hinged on declaring the Slavs subhuman and taking their land for Germans to colonize. Him making a permanent alliance with the Soviets is about as likely as him deciding the Jews are totally cool. Yeah Hitler, Stalin, and literally everybody else knew that that non-aggression pact would never, ever last. Even if that did happen, even if Germany and Italy didn't lose, the Axis Powers were guaranteed to fall apart based solely on each nation's goal of "conquer the gently caress out of absolutely everybody else." Germany and Japan got along because they were just so far apart though they'd have expanded into each other eventually. Germany and Italy got along largely because Mussolini was an incompetent cartoon character who posed no real threat. Ally of convenience, if you will. You can't really ally with a guy like Hitler and people like the Nazis without just assuming you'll have to fight them eventually.
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May 1, 2016 03:03
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Carbon dioxide posted:"Most historical quotes have been made up in modern times." - Nikola Tesla "If you want somebody to believe something tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it." - Benjamin Franklin
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Jun 13, 2016 23:26
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A White Guy posted:Yeah, every single city and state would issue its own currency. The only way merchants would take that money is if that money were made from gold or silver. It doesn't really matter who's face is on the coin, so long as its mostly the metal that it's supposed to be. That was actually the original point of currency; it chunked the gold apart into much more manageable pieces than like a bar or something. In a lot of places if you had a blob of some precious metal you could have it minted into coins. It wasn't the coin that was valuable it was what it was made from. This is also why merchants tended to have scales; X number of coins may or may not weigh a pound consistently but a pound of gold is a pound of gold. That's also what led to the obsession with alchemy. Lead was pretty worthless so everybody said "hey can we turn this into something less lovely?" Alchemy led to chemistry and also influenced metallurgy a lot. People kept trying to mix different metals together to get gold (or, in some cases, something that looked like gold) out the other end. This is also why counterfeiting was a huge problem and why you ended up with things like trifle pewter. You could cut certain metals with other metals and it would be barely noticeable or even not at all. Now your 10 pounds of silver is 12 pounds of silver! Huzzah! A city that had a good reputation for minting very good coins that weren't cut (or outright fake) could become quite wealthy as their money, and those their bank notes, were valuable basically everywhere. A fun fact that people don't know is that precious metal coins weren't the only thing that was effectively currency. Grain comes to mind; properly stored wheat could keep for a rather impressive amount of time and would be traded around basically like a currency. After all, everybody eats bread, right? Food is pretty much always in good demand and at the time was pretty hard to overproduce and devalue.
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Jul 28, 2016 23:40
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Sorbocules posted:I remember reading a few years ago that the ancient roman legions would regularly use salt for the same reason. Preserving food through winter is almost as good as being able to make more during the winter. Can't verify the veracity, but it also suggested that this is where we get the term "salary" and "worth it's salt." That could all be pop-history nonsense though. Salt in that time period was actually crazy valuable and traded extensively so yes you are correct. It's been an important food preservative for basically ever. You also need a certain amount of salt to, you know, not die so it's...kind of a big deal.
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Jul 29, 2016 00:18
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Arcsquad12 posted:I don't think it was the scarcity of salt that made it a valuable commodity, but because it was so sought after in areas not near a coastline. I'd imagine areas with a high salt concentration would significantly devalue it compared to sub-saharan nations too far inland. It was the differing local scarcity that made it valuable. This is why trade networks happened; salt flats, dried lakes, and the places that rock salt can be mined are useful for gently caress all other than salt. However, salt was literally impossible to get in some places. Others it was prohibitively costly to get locally. Everybody needed salt but few people had an easy supply. Of course you can't catch fish on a salt flat soooooo if you want fish you gots to trade but hey that one culture that has good fishing water can't make enough salt to preserve it. This other culture makes pots good for storing stuff in so hey let's each do our thing, trade the results, and we'll all have long term stores of salted fish.
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Jul 29, 2016 17:40
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Snapchat A Titty posted:This is a total guess, but presumably you either made arrows yourself (if you were poor) or hired a fletcher to do it (if you were rich). There wasn't a sizable middle-class yet in the middle ages, so there wasn't really a market for a lot of things. I think it was a bizarre mish mash of making them yourself, bartering for the parts you couldn't, and sharing the kill with whoever produced the arrow. Like the town smith made basically everybody's tools but wasn't necessarily paid in coin. He still needed to eat so he's probably be willing to trade some tools for several loaves of bread and a chicken or whatever. Granted hunting at the time was primarily a noble thing; most people were subsistence farmers so the point was largely moot. Any meat they ate probably came from farm animals.
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Jul 30, 2016 00:00
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Ddraig posted:They did, but only if you were the right sort. That girl evidently wasn't. It's also possible that whoever killed here was "the right sort;" it was far, far easier for the wealthy, noble, and/or powerful to get away with poo poo then than it was now. I imagine that's part of why it says "...by tramps." That or the police just didn't feel like bothering with it. At the time you could seriously just go "meh, gypsies did it" and leave it at that.
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Sep 25, 2016 21:20
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El Estrago Bonito posted:No Wittman was not a good guy, but he also wasn't involved in any actual atrocities, he was just dedicated to killing people on the other side of the war. Compared to some of the other people, for example the previously mentioned Kurt "the SS committed no crimes, except the massacre at Oradour, and that was the action of a single man" Meyer he's pretty tame compared to a lot of other Nazis. One of the big issues with studying WWII is just how vilified all the Germans are. Yes, lots of them were terrible people, most of them were or supported anti-Semetism and racism (but then again, so did a lot of our allies), but we forget that a lot of people joined the Nazi party and the SS because they wanted to advance their careers in a fascist police state engulfed in propaganda and controlled by an agency who ruthlessly silenced dissenting opinion. There's a line between being a Nazi apologist, which a unsettling amount of historians are, and taking into account the attitudes of the time and the culture where people were coming from. We all like to imagine that if we were living in Nazi Germany we'd all be freedom fighters who smuggled Jews to safety and undermined Hitler's regime. But the amount of people who did that was extremely small, and in reality we're all mostly military service age adults who'd probably be in the Wehrmacht digging trenches in North Africa or machining thousands of bullets and guns in factories day in and day out. It's easy to cast an entire cast of people as the bad guys and forget they were real people who had real reasons for everything they did, and no one thinks they're the villain in their own story. These days we're all big on the supporting troops but not the military industrial complex thing, but we sometimes forget to apply that to the past in relevant ways. You don't hold a young German man fighting in the deserts of Africa against the British accountable for the crimes of his government any more than you should blame a random Marine in Afghanistan for people being tortured at Guantanamo bay. It's also worth noting that even some high-ranking literal Nazis didn't agree with Hitler's little "murder literally all of the Jews" project. There was a major plot to kill Hitler and end the nastier parts of Nazism; Rommel in particular probably participated in it and also refused to turn over captured Jewish enemy soldiers. He treated them like any other POW, which made Hitler pretty unhappy. To some serving their nation was the more important thing; this was true of Rommel as well. He was a loyal old German military dude who would do what was right for his nation, though that was up to and including refusing some direct orders. The common folks also didn't necessarily even know about the Holocaust. In a lot of areas the undesirables were just loaded on trains with the message being "we're moving them." Pretty much "hey we just conquered Poland so we're keeping Germany for the Germans. Everybody else has to go over to Poland." Your bog standard infantryman may not have even known the Holocaust was happening. He probably also had a head full of propaganda and family of some sort. WWI and the economic nastiness Germany endured after it were still pretty fresh memories; it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the average German could have just hated the rest of the world. Other times it was a matter of survival. This wasn't a time where moving far away was cheap and easy. If the Nazis handed you a gun or a wrench and said "hey you're helping" well...what the hell could you do? I mean your kids gotta eat, right? Desertion was probably a terrible idea and God help you if you deserted to somewhere that the Nazis conquered later. Aside from that some didn't like the mass deportation/murder of people Hitler didn't like but were loyal enough to Germany that they just grit their teeth and did what they had to. Then you get into people saying "well X person was a member of the Hitler Youth!" Well...you, uh...didn't get a choice on that one. That also pre-dated the Holocaust. It doesn't justify Nazi apologists at all of course but this idea that Nazi Germany was some gigantic monolith of hate where everybody agreed is kind of absurd. I imagine a lot of Germans, after the war was over, just kind of went "holy poo poo I'm glad that's over and I survived it." It's just much, much easier to paint The Other Guys as a unilaterally evil group. It also makes it easier to not feel bad about firebombing entire cities. Thank you, propaganda.
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Oct 24, 2016 23:25
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Alhazred posted:They probably did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kellner#The_war_years Well that's going on my reading list. Didn't even know about that.
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Oct 25, 2016 18:45
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El Estrago Bonito posted:My favorite part of Italian Fascism is that the Italian Fascist Manifesto of Combat would be considered an insanely liberal screed in modern America. I can totally see how people signed on to their platform when that was what they presented because honestly lots of it sounds pretty great. I mean, they then did the classic dictator moves of "have a really nice and cool constitution, but suspend it indefinitely" and "not actually use our founding document but instead build a cult of personality" but at least initially it makes some sense. The most interesting thing about Fascist Italy during the WWII era was that Mussolini was so unbelievably incompetent he was basically a living cartoon character. Fun fat about Mussolini: despite doing the whole "I am a perfect person who is never sick, tired, or injured in any way so I get to be in charge" thing that is so popular among dictators he also had stomach issues. This resulted in him, at one point, living entirely on milk and crackers for about a year. It...went about as well as you'd expect.
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Oct 29, 2016 04:35
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The heels and calves thing was related to horse riding. Horses were a status symbol and cavalry generally came from the nobility. If you could afford horses you were a Good and Proper man. This was also the colonial era where everybody was fighting everybody else pretty much all the time. Being a tough fighter was very socially important if you were a dude. Notice that the guy looking over his shoulder is turned to show off his boots. Specifically the back. He's wearing spurs. You had to earn the right to wear spurs and that only happened in battle. He's also holding riding gloves. He's saying "I am a total bad rear end that will gently caress up your kingdom and take your land" right there.
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Nov 5, 2016 17:29
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Rutibex posted:Yes it is, though its super close. The Illiad and the Odyssey are epic poems from a much earlier greek oral tradition. They were basically the first things written down (by the Greeks). Memorizing poo poo got to a point where writing it down was necessary. Writing things down instead of memorizing them happened because human memory is fallible. Also if everybody who memorized something dies it's lost. On top of that it's easier to write something down than it is to memorize it. Paper is just way better than human brains at storing information long term. Paper obviously decays eventually but there wasn't much better for a very long time.
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Nov 6, 2016 13:42
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:And this, kids, is how bias leads to bad science. Women are worthless so any objects they use must be too. And of course knitting is always women's work. That was actually a common oops that corrections have been circulating around archaeological circles about for a while now. The automatic assumption was that if somebody was buried with weapons or had injuries that indicated being in a war (it's actually amazing how much you can tell about somebody by looking at their bones 900 years later!) it was a dude. Skeleton wearing armor and holding an axe? Definitely a respected dude that society was cool with. ...then closer examination of the skeletons showed that a hell of a lot of them were women. For some culture that assumption did hold but for more cultures there were poo poo loads of women who fought as well. It also turned out that the image of Vikings as a bunch of heavily bearded dudes in horned helmets screaming and wielding axes were so, so unbelievably wrong. Depending on the era Viking people who fought could very well be half made up of women. Interestingly enough cultures that one would consider "tough and badass" now often did have fighting women in their ranks. In other cultures fighting was considered men's work but there were still ways women could get in on the game. Among a lot of indigenous American peoples there was the concept of the "two-spirit." Now, generally speaking things were delineated between "women's work" and "men's work." There were gender roles but they weren't harshly enforced. There were even special jobs that only two-spirited people could have. "What's a two spirit," you ask? It's essentially somebody who doesn't fit the mold of one gender or the other. A woman who dressed and behaved like a man or a man who dressed and behaved like a woman was a two-spirit. There were some grey areas and it depended a lot on culture and area but that was the short of it. Often two-spirits had special words for their gender and would marry somebody of their own biological gender. In some cultures they were considered spiritually stronger and would become spiritual leaders. Apparently woman two-spirits who became warriors were absolutely god damned terrifying.
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Nov 24, 2016 00:30
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Old sex toys: proof that humans have always been human. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/01/19/stone-penis-28000-years-old_n_6499780.html
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Nov 24, 2016 02:32
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steinrokkan posted:That's a question nobody who hasn't experienced actual starvation can answer honestly. But I think I would be as appalled by the idea of eating my own dog as I would be by eating a human corpse. Humans in general will readily eat their pets, and their neighbors for that matter, if times get bad enough. When severe famine strikes pets are generally the first to go as they trust humans to feed them. People might resist eating their own pets first but if you're hungry enough and the neighbor's dog gets loose, well...it isn't my dog. This is part of why extreme food scarcity destroys societies. As people become increasingly desperate they increasingly do desperate things.
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Nov 26, 2016 23:47
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chitoryu12 posted:My fiancee has a fascination with Marie Antoinette, and this is generally the same opinion she has. It's easy to deride her decisions when you haven't had to live in the situation she did, and I think everyone would agree that chopping her head off was (to put it mildly) a bit of an overreaction. It really is a tragic story; she was apparently not all that bright and just didn't understand the intrigue of a royal court. As was said she wasn't that great of a student but she didn't write well at all and barely spoke any of the languages one would be expected to at court. She was literally a teenager when she was thrust into an already unstable political situation that she just didn't get. France already had bad enough issues that the king at the time (Louis XV) basically couldn't enter the actual city of Paris dressed like a king. Him and his court had to dress down and pretend they weren't royalty. France also got a sound thrashing in the Seven Year's War and was in crazy debt; it didn't help that Louis XV liked to gently caress pretty much everything and the royal expenditures involved a rather large number of mistresses. He was apparently a mix of a decent but declining ruler and a petulant manchild. A lot of the problems that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI faced were based entirely on simmering resentment toward the royalty that they had absolutely no hand in. The fact that Marie Antoinette just loved living in luxury and Louis XVI didn't deny her like...anything no matter how expensive it was just made matters worse. While the nation was suffering serious financial issues she was spending poo poo loads of money on things even other royalty considered completely and totally frivolous. Granted the other big snag was that the entire aristocracy at the time just plain wasn't willing to give up their opulent lifestyles. Marie Antoinette got pretty much the entirety of the blame. There was really nothing she could have done by the point that opinion turned totally against her. Intrigue and machinations within the country's political engine just made it worse as every problem the country faced just got thrown at her feet while her husband became severely depressed and basically let her run things. It was a broken, impossible to fix situation that she didn't have the tools or skills to deal with at all.
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Dec 8, 2016 01:10
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