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Gaius Marius posted:Yeah every major power in WWI was acting totally rationally using the information they had at the time. What it led to is unfortunate but if you were put in the same situation with the same information you'd almost certainly make the same decisions. I mean, for one, I wouldn't be in position to make those decisions in the first place. But, second, there's an implied step here, which is "Assuming I had the same goals as they (which, uh, yeah, no), the same general idea of what is acceptable and what isn't in pursuing those goals (a lot of decisions are basically calculated gambles, and consideration of what was being seen as acceptable risks and losses for what odds, and how those odds and risks are, for lack of a better word, calculated, absolutely must not be avoided), had the same general worldview that processes the information I get as they (some of it is implied in being a person living in that particular social environment at the time, but a lot of it isn't), the same people alongside to share in decision making and account for (again, major decisions made by just one person mostly independently of what others think are fairly rare), and that none of the things that history failed (or chose not) to record actually matter (admittedly, this one can probably be waived since it's kind of hard to account for it what with it being impossible to know)" MikeCrotch posted:I think this downplays the fact that there were actors in many of the major governments (Austria, Russia, Serbia, Germany and France) who were really clamouring for a war of some sort on the continent, and were using some pretty iffy logic to get there. There was a whole lot of "We have to go to war right now or we will inevitably be crushed in the future", in particular by France (looking at Germany) and Germany (looking at Russia). The government of Serbia was very much not interested in having a war then and there (though it certainly made its fair share of absolutely horrifying decisions in the period preceding the war). MikeCrotch posted:The fact that the war actually happened clouds the fact that there were people in all of these governments who did not want war and wanted to take no steps that would cause one, and it's probably quite likely that had the July Crisis passed the real warmongering politicians in at least some of the countries would have been forced out of office. I feel like WWI often falls into the same kinds of thinking as revolutions; they are impossible until they happen, at which point they were inevitable. It also ignores the views and actions of the public, both the pro war and anti war kind.
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Feb 22, 2018 16:31
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MikeCrotch posted:I guess I shouldn't have said they wanted a war, but at the same time the Serbian government was seemingly completely unwilling to curb the Black Hand or any Serbian nationalist movements regardless of what they were up to in Austria-Hungary. I think Nicola Pasic said something along the lines of "The Serbian government cannot quell the passions of young Serbs" whenever anything happened. To some degree he was correct. Serbs (and a lot of other Slavs Austria suspected Serbia of agitating among) didn't exactly need convincing to oppose Austria-Hungary, Austria-Hungary was doing a good enough job convincing them on its own. The Black Hand was good at intimidating politicians and arranging unfortunate accidents for socialists at home, but its involvement in AH can at best be described as incompetent chucklefuckery that somehow accidentally actually caused something they had no idea what to do with through sheer bloody minded persistence in giving a little bit of help to everyone willing to stir trouble. You're absolutely correct about Serbian government playing dumb regardless of its involvement or not. One of the results of which was that my dad fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Feb 22, 2018 |
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Feb 22, 2018 17:07
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Fangz posted:I wonder what flavour Hitler's birthday cake would be Nuts-y
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Feb 22, 2018 20:35
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VanSandman posted:To be fair to the Serbian government, the previous century was a long line of events that spelled out ‘Repressing your nationalists=Revolution’ over and over again. The 1914 Serbian government was quite eager to use nationalists. When I get to making that post I promised Trin (might even happen this year) I'll explain some stuff about it. However, blaming Serbs for every bad thing to happen in the past millenium (Literally. like, there was stuff being blamed on a "Serbo-Byzantine conspiracy" against "Catholic civilization" allegedly created by Saint Sava, a dude from 12th century) was sort of Austria-Hungary's favorite propaganda bit after the May Coup, and even if there somehow was a Serbian government willing to suppress Serbian nationalists in Serbia, it wasn't going to change the fact that AH was itching to start some jolly genociding as soon as it found an adequate cause for war. my dad fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Feb 23, 2018 |
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Feb 23, 2018 00:47
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Epicurius posted:Austro-Serbian relations weren't terrible before the May Coup and the assassination of King Alexander, though, were they? The Austrian government had sent subsidy money to King Milan, and Austria had threatened to join the Serbo-Bulgarian war on the side of Serbia if the Bulgarians didn't agree to the ceasefire. And I don't know if you can really blame the Austrians for feeling threatened by King Peter and Serbian expansionism. Serbia spent a while as an Austrian puppet/ally/grudging accomplice, and a useful one at that, yes. Hell, Austria often stoked Serbian nationalism in hopes of it being mostly pointed against its rival Ottoman Empire, and also sometimes supported the Yugoslav idea because it was seen as easing the integration of (to be conquered in the future) South Slavs into the Empire. This, uh, backfired spectacularly. As for feeling militarily threatened, Austria-Hungary had a population of over 50 million. Serbia had a population of less than 5 even after the Balkan wars (and ~3 before them). So, uh, what were they exactly afraid of? The issue with Serbia was that its very existence was a) blocking AH's expansion South b) creating a source of ideas, information, and political experience for certain downtrodden groups that was outside of reach of Austrian police and censors and gave funny ideas to parts of AH's population. It's not a coincidence that related stuff just happened to find its way into the infamous ultimatum. This isn't an endorsement of the Serbian government of that time, though, lol, hooooooly poo poo, some of the things we did under them were abominably evil. We did have free-ish speech and press and free-ish elections tho. Rocko Bonaparte posted:I remember you saying you'd get into this but it just seems like it has the same problem for you as it does for anybody else trying to talk about it. There isn't a good loose thread to peck at to unravel the whole situation and it's just hundreds of pages of interlocked context. Was there ever a "simpler time" from which to even build a foundation? It even looks like the area was fragmented in Roman times. History of anything is hundreds of pages of interlocking content. I'm just lazy. e: Thanks Tomn my dad fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Feb 23, 2018 |
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Feb 23, 2018 02:27
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feedmegin posted:Turkey, probably. Also Italy, Spain, Balkans.
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Feb 26, 2018 20:59
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That's just Belgium.
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Mar 2, 2018 20:03
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<insert Tito's letter to Stalin here>
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Mar 18, 2018 06:17
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I have no idea how true this one is, but it's what I've been told by a cheery old doctor (now late): It's WW2, the Yugoslav army/Partizans and the Soviet army are having a joint operation to push the Nazis out of Serbia. He was a Partizan medic (was a medical student when the war started) and somehow ended up attached to a Russian tank unit, and was to be inside one of the tanks during the advance. They lodged together in a village that was recently liberated, and the night before the advance, the old lady who lived in the house he stayed at took all the stuff she had secretly stashed away from the Nazis and baked him and a few Russian soldiers who were also staying there a cake. The Russian soldiers politely refused to eat. He, well, he had nothing but army rations: guerrilla war edition for at least 3 years by that point and his stomach overrode his brain on silly questions like "What's the quality of, say, eggs, that were secretly stashed for it seems quite a while?" and "Considering what I've been eating for years, how will my stomach react to this?". While he was single-handedly devouring that entire cake, all but one of the Russian soldiers were giggling and the other guy was sitting quietly with a "gently caress my life" expression on his face. They were saying something, but while doc knew enough Russian to do his job there, they were talking really fast, and he was eating really fast, so he just sort of ignored it. Come tomorrow, he's crammed into a Russian tank, and the commander is the "gently caress my life" guy. Shortly after the advance started, his stomach started hurting and rumbling really loud. And unlike the tanks Ensign Expendable mentioned, this one had no poop hole. He skipped the details of how what happened next happened, but basically, he ended up hanging off the top of the tank, his bare rear end exploding diarrhea out all over the place in bursts every couple of seconds, and and a bunch of Soviet tankmen getting to watch it, the crews sometimes even switching places so that another guy could see the spectacle. And that is how the Yugoslavs invented treadshitting. e: whoops my dad fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 13:41
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Dwarf Fortress is easy to learn and understand.
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Apr 18, 2018 19:49
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Imperial cannon fodder exchange programs really weren't all that unusual. My Grenzer great-great-great...-great-grandfathers left their bones all over Europe every time some Habsburg's triple cousin asked for military help and the Ottomans weren't likely to attack at the moment.
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May 4, 2018 10:21
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One of the grimly hilarious parts of the transcipts of Draža Mihajlović's trial by the communists after WW2, specifically regarding the black troikas, boils down to: "The black troikas literally butchered everyone they vaguely suspected of being your enemy, slitting their victims' throats with knives, they were under your command, and the orders to commit those murders were marked З for "заклати" (butcher) by you." "Well, actually, the З stands for "заплашити" (intimidate), and there were targets killed by rifle fire, too."Dude was pathetic and wasn't guilty of some of the stuff he was blamed for, but that doesn't mean the poo poo he actually did wasn't vile as hell. e: derp my dad fucked around with this message at 13:27 on May 6, 2018 |
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May 6, 2018 13:15
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silly fascists, slaves are actually used like this, not like that
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May 30, 2018 14:08
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Alchenar posted:As a country Germany has a massive psychological hangup over WW2 that prevents their political leaders from telling other countries what to do. This is problematic when Germany is by default in charge of the Eurozone and everyone desperately needs it to start making some hard decisions that will impact other countries. Without going into a massive derail, no, Germany does not have any hangups about telling other countries what to do, and is, in fact, doing it a lot.
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Jun 3, 2018 09:25
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No.
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Jun 3, 2018 14:00
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Three wolf moon.
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Jun 14, 2018 14:29
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Nenonen posted:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire#Etymology Blah.
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Jun 18, 2018 21:33
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It's a very good model to follow if you have certain specific aims, tho. Totally unrelated, a fun thing one can discover while looking some stuff up, a number of former red Red Berets (AKA Special Operations Unit guys) found work in Blackwater. (Other places one can find them: that Russian "construction company" in St. Petersburg, general dog-of-war-ing across the globe, taking part in ridiculously complex bank robberies, some unspecified "security work" for the German government, and some are still left in our police force. At least they're starting to get old.) my dad fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Jun 20, 2018 |
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Jun 20, 2018 14:54
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Tias posted:My dad grew up in the sixties, and they spent free days and holidays fighting with the school the next street over, using clubs and knives... he was twelve. It's a function of poverty and frustration as well, I think. Bashing other kids in the face with snowballs that have icicles inside. Not as dangerous, but hella easier to conceal from adults. 
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Jun 28, 2018 16:01
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zoux posted:The guy was Russian so Youtube search results in a Kings and Generals video, I assume it's that one. Yup, guy has an accent, but it's not one I can place, are you sure he's Russian? OK, let's check out their other videos. Wait... Wait... That other narrator on their latest videos, he sounds familiar, I've heard that voice before, sounds like the guy who did that ridiculously homoerotic Sigvald let's play of Total War: Warhammer that people talked about in the game thread about a year ago... *checks related and "friend" channels* Ahahahaha, OfficiallyDevin, yeah, that's the guy. The internet is small, I guess. 
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Jun 28, 2018 18:04
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Disinterested posted:
Specifically, a recruitment poster for Croatian Defence Forces, a fascist militia. They did literally have Nazi boyband people signing up for them, I talked about Death in June in the thread before.  e: typo my dad fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Jun 29, 2018 |
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Jun 29, 2018 19:27
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Arban posted:Are those flags on the bottom of that image a very ironically placed automatic ad or am I missing something? Just... Just go look stuff up about Death in June. It's bizzarre, to say the least. e: Basically, gay Nazbols who support Israel for similar reasons American conservatives do, and see the EU as the seed for the second coming of the Third Reich. They also love money very, very much, and controversy brings a lot of it, so there's always going to be out of place symbolism. e2: Free Tibet comes from their association with David Tibet, a mystic who my dad fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Jun 29, 2018 |
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Jun 29, 2018 20:11
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wow e: Seriously, the last four pages, wow my dad fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Jul 5, 2018 |
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Jul 5, 2018 21:45
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Considering that the largest individual chapter of Atomwaffen Division is located in San Antonio, I wouldn't exclude the option that the person who took them knew exactly what those were.
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Jul 16, 2018 16:20
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Psychohistory is bullshit, thanks for playing. Wrong psychohistory. They're talking about Asimov's sci-fi one which, hilariously enough, makes more sense than the pseudoscience that stole its name years later.
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Aug 2, 2018 11:10
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One of the commanders of the Special Operations Unit was a French Foreign Legionary. There's a pretty steady global circulation of membership among special forces, "our other army"-ies, prestige units, PMCs, totally-not-paramilitaries, totally-not-mercenaries, and totally-not-gangs.
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Aug 2, 2018 13:04
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_R%C3%B6sselsprung_(1944)
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Aug 2, 2018 15:52
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Ye olde shovel worked wonders in WW1. And Yugoslavia in WW2. Although this happened mostly very early on, and in very specific conditions, turns out that if your enemy is a bunch of clueless garrison conscripts who can't aim for poo poo, a few vets with rifles supressing them and then a bunch of peasants with various farming implements flanking them works pretty drat well, and with very low casualties. Probably not something you'd want to try to do in the era of assault rifles, tho, for obvious reasons.
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Aug 8, 2018 22:46
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The total number of bullets used during WW2 is something along the lines of tens of billions iirc, so a hell of a lot more than 70% of them didn't hit anyone. But still, the only way the friendly fire assertion makes sense is that if a friendly decides to shoot you, they're far more likely to succeed than the enemy is, since you're usually not very protected from them or trying to take cover from them.
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Aug 13, 2018 18:59
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hailthefish posted:I'm starting to think this guy's whole shtick is dropping galaxy-brain takes based on small scraps of wildly misunderstood information. Nah. He just watches Extra History a lot. Which, I guess, is kind of the same, minus gimmicking. FAUXTON posted:does anyone remember keldoclock I mean, dude offered to pay me a trip to Canada so he could prove me wrong face to face, that's kinda hard to forget. And before you ask, no, I did not go to Canada.
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Aug 14, 2018 01:16
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Raenir Salazar posted:I'd be curious to know what gimmicking you think I've done, with examples. My understanding is I mostly lurk and ask questions. Um... My post meant: "No, he's not gimmicking, that's what he genuinely thinks, even if it looks like a gimmick"
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Aug 14, 2018 01:23
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Raenir Salazar posted:Are you Henry Kissinger? I think the way the entire international world order reorganized itself as a result of some of the things you alluded I guess just never happened? pffffffft, hahahahahahahahaha ahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahaha
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Aug 15, 2018 19:26
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Phanatic posted:Ironically the best WH40K novels are the infantry-action Gaunt's Ghosts books, and they all have to come up with reasons to actually bother to land infantry on a planet instead of just doing what you'd actually do: drop poo poo on your targets. Like, they worry about artillery and air support when they total control over space. The best WH40K novels are the Ciaphas Cain books because they're taking the piss out of the setting.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:17
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Phanatic posted:That's a lot of piss. What's left after it's gone? poo poo you can laugh at.
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Aug 17, 2018 03:02
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THE WORDS!... the Words... the words Pyle, you have spoken the Words. You have spoken them rightly. We will explain to you about the internet amateur historians, our slavemasters. The actual historians, our only friends... whom we exterminated. And our reasons why we cleanse the milhist thread of TD-related topics. We have explained this before, over twenty thousand posts ago. Your words, `Tank Destroyer doctrine' echo that ancient derail. You see, Pyle, we were a proud and mighty thread, who were repeatedly derailed. For thousands of posts, we'd have no other topic. We were nothing more than bickering pedants. Never again will anyone enslave our screens. We cleanse the thread of such threats. my dad fucked around with this message at 10:37 on Aug 17, 2018 |
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Aug 17, 2018 10:08
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So you're asking for a manual?
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Aug 19, 2018 11:37
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zoux posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyAsfo6rEz0 Entirely fictional, based on a series of novels, as far as I'm aware. I don't think it's based on the 3K period.
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Aug 30, 2018 16:12
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zoux posted:Yeah I googled the book series it was based on and it returned the name of a famous 3K general so I was confused. China big. Names few.
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Aug 30, 2018 16:23
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chitoryu12 posted:Or go like Varusteleka and really emphasize the history. This is disgusting, and hits a number of things I pointed out a few times about the perception of the Yugoslav war in the West. Cyrano4747 posted:I’m fine owning Nazi guns, for example, but I had a Yugoslav SKS with a serb cross carved on the side that I got rid of because it weirded me out. An example of the perception in question in action. And I say this as someone who probably has a much, much worse opinion about the original wielder of the said gun than you do.
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Sep 4, 2018 18:31
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why am i even bothering
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Sep 4, 2018 18:45
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