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The Japanese soldier looks almost disappointed in how he isn't nearly as blinged out as anyone else in that photo.
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Nov 10, 2016 01:38
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Way back when I was in high school, there was a guy on a forum I went to who was convinced that instead of reforming after the Boshin War and opening up, Japan should have closed the borders again and then just "teched up" for a few decades then conquer the rest of the world. I guess he meant Emperor Meiji should have set the research slider to max and stacked research bonuses or something. EDIT: In hindsight I'm definitely blaming way too much Civ on that line of thinking. Don Gato fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Nov 20, 2016 |
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Nov 20, 2016 08:22
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Rockopolis posted:Hey, thanks! Kindle version's only six bux. The complete works of Niall Fergueson
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Dec 14, 2016 03:32
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Eela6 posted:
I took leave and am with my family, my friends who didn't take leave got Friday and Monday off. Last year when I was in language training I got two weeks of block leave where I could take time off or be put on pointless details. Generally they make you do pointless details if you don't take leave in my experience.
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Dec 25, 2016 03:03
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OwlFancier posted:I suppose if MI5 can convince the entire planet that carrots give you night vision it's not overly surprising that Dunkirk being cool and good stuck as well. Wait, that's where that myth came from? My dad used to tell that to me all the time as an example of when "common wisdom" is wrong, I had no idea it originally came from MI5.
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Jan 6, 2017 05:01
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Ainsley McTree posted:I used to bullseye those in my T-16 back home. I was going to make a dumb pun by linking a real world vehicle here but apparently the only real T-16 is what the Canadians called the Bren gun carrier and an obscure Russian tank
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Jan 21, 2017 09:43
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ChaseSP posted:According to the accounts I've heard, modern rations are designed to give you constipation so you don't poo poo yourself while fighting. Officially they don't cause constipation, but last time I ate nothing but MREs for a week I had the worst case of constipation ever. A lot of that was also due to not getting nearly enough water and running around in Texas heat in MOPP gear but still, not something I would willingly want to go through again. And while I know the plural of anecdote isn't data but basically everyone I knew also ended up wicked constipated that week. I can only imagine how bad it is if you are stuck in Kandahar, or somewhere else even hotter than where I was.
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Jan 26, 2017 04:50
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Ainsley McTree posted:Wasn't there a guy who somehow managed to be in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima for the bombs, and he lived to tell about it? They should have you play as him. Supposedly he survived Hiroshima, went back to Nagasaki and was bombed while trying to explain to his boss how an entire city was wiped off the face of the earth with one weapon. Slightly related, my deceased great-aunt was actually a nurse who was at Hiroshima after the bomb dropped. She never talked about it in detail but she did always tell us that we (as in, everyone in the family) were not allowed to give into despair and cry because she didn't cry when she was nuked, and whatever you are going through isn't nearly as bad as that. She was like the personification of the Japanese saying "it can't be helped", which coincidentally she used to tell us all the time. I only asked her about the bomb once, and she knew that I was getting into photography so she gave me a book that was entirely photos taken post-bomb. I never asked her about it again, and also I didn't sleep for like a week because holy poo poo a crocodile person (?) is the most horrifying thing I've ever seen 
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Apr 27, 2017 21:59
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Nenonen posted:Any Chinese in this thread? How is the Korean war handled in Chinese/Taiwanese school history books? When I read history books in Chinese, I noticed that there is a persistent claim in the PRC that the US used chemical weapons in Korea. Not sure how widely believed it is but I'll check after work to see if I didnt put those chinese history books in storage, I dont think those books had an English translation.
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May 2, 2017 21:07
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Most of my books are in storage, including what I was looking for, but I did find this about supposed chemical warfare used during the Korean War, which as far as I can tell is only really said in China because in English I can only find allegations for American use of biological weapons. The website claims that on 89 different occasions, the US used chemical weapons against the PLA and KPA and killed hundreds to thousands of civilians and soldiers. I don't know how widely believed this claim is, but that is the main search engine officially used in China, so As for Taiwan, as far as I can see it is pretty close to how the US views the Korean war and nothing really odd or eyebrow raising. The last sentence is seriously great by the way, roughly translated it says "The American army carried out chemical warfare as a kind of 'poison magic' in the Korean War, but [chemical warfare] was unable to achieve its expected purpose, and American chemical warfare was unable to change [the American's] destiny of defeat." Chinese is my third language so if anyone could point out any glaringly obvious mistakes I made, please tell me. quote:
See also: The plot of every Chinese historical drama set in WWII.
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May 3, 2017 05:00
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Kopijeger posted:This Soviet poster at least acknowledges that other nations were involved: Remember that modern China isn't controlled by the same government that was fighting in WWII, all the propaganda posters from that era were made by the KMT, who are portrayed in state media as inept and corrupt at best, and actively cooperating with the Japanese at worst. So while the KMT most likely had posters that showed the assistance provided by the West, the CCP has built an entire mythology on how they were the ones who single-handedly threw out the Japanese when the KMT couldn't/wouldn't which persists to the present day. Acknowledging that the other nations had any part in liberating China undermines that obviously, so China (specifically the communist party) is the entire reason why the War in Asia was won, and there might be some stuff about killing that Hitler fellow over in Europe if it is a really good textbook. OTOH I've read a few Taiwanese sources that credit the Western countries with helping to beat the Japanese, and the Taiwanese people I've talked to know about the Flying Tigers and their role in the war. It makes sense, since the West was directly providing aid to the KMT before, during and after the war in the form of both men and materiel, while the CCP at best received some lip service from the Soviet Union, so from a certain point of view they did fight the Japanese without foreign assistance  Unrelated but I did find this poster from Korea while looking for WWII posters:  TL: Long live the victorious Korean People's Army and Chinese Volunteer Army! Maybe it's just me but that pair of Korean and Chinese soldiers look like they've seen some poo poo. ulmont posted:I don't know about chemical weapons, but massacring civilians was semi-official to official US policy in the Korean War with attested deaths of hundreds to thousands of civilians. Interesting, I've only read about what the South Korean military itself had done during the war and assumed that was also Northern propaganda. I also don't know much about that war in general except for the development of the air war. EDIT: Tias posted:That depends.. In most( all?) scandinavian languages, we call them Tjekkiet, where 'iet' is equal to the English 'ia'. It's very specific, either B-29s dropping chemical weapons on Nampo and Wonsan or artillery crews bombarding the innocent PLA soldiers post-armistice with chemical weapons. That might be part of it, because in Chinese those units are literally called "Smoke-making/spurt-fire-weapon team" and there was a translation error. At this point I'd hazard to guess that it is more to do with how the it was a useful piece of propaganda 60 years ago, and no one in the US has raised a huge fuss over it so it's easier to keep up the party line than change it. Don Gato fucked around with this message at 09:10 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 07:32
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Nebakenezzer posted:I've been watching the Viva Villa! on TCM and I'm under the impression Pancho Villa owned He's my favorite personality from that era, and its also interesting to see how fast public opinion in America turned against him. I wish he was more well known in America other than "bandido who attacked us that one time" My grandpa in Mexico City also calls him the Centaur of the North, and when I was a kid I thought this meant he was literally a gun wielding centaur. Words can not describe my disappointment when I found out the truth.
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May 6, 2017 01:24
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Wasn't he the same dude who built the giant gold statue of himself that always rotated to face the sun? That was actually real? Like, I thought that was the Onion making fun of his ego Edit: The next Paradox game needs to let me go full crazy dictator, I need my giant gold statue of myself.
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May 7, 2017 06:19
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Grouchio posted:Porfirio Diaz? I As the Futurama quote goes "Oh, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder" He wasn't terrible but that doesn't make him good for the country. Of course, like anything relating to Mexican history, people have all kinds of opinions regarding him, but I personally blame his not stepping down from power as one of the chief causes of the Mexican revolution during the 1910's and 20's. This probably says more about my personal politics than anything else.
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May 7, 2017 10:53
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Grand Prize Winner posted:How is Maximilian viewed in Mexico? From US-centric pop-history (and not much of that really talks about him, or Mexico in general, which is a drat shame) he seems like a well-meaning but not too competent European aristocrat in a time and place where being a European aristocrat is a somewhat poor idea. Now that I'm no longer drunk, I can answer this question properly. Again, it depends on who you ask. In the broadest terms, he is extremely unpopular among the far left circles, while the far right loves him. When I'm in Mexico and hear someone praising what he did, my first reaction is that I'm talking to a supporter of the FNM. While he did try to enact liberal reforms, during his life he was only popular among the extremely conservative parts of the population, and spent his entire reign fighting against Benito Juárez and, indirectly, the United States. In what I've read, my own opinions and the feeling I get from people I talk to, he was a German twat who was not very good at anything but making people mad at him, and at best he was a puppet of the French Empire who loved his country but couldn't see that his love was not reciprocated. Also he killed thousands of people without due process because they were Juárez supporters, so he wasn't very benevolent either. Whether you think all of that is a tragedy because he was forced into doing this in order to crush a persistent and illegal rebellion, or a crime done by a tyrant who was desperate to hold onto any ounce of power will depend on where you fall on the political spectrum. There was a telenovela about his life, for what that's worth. And interestingly enough, while he was viewed as a puppet state and usurper of Benito Juárez's legitimate government by the United States, Austria, Prussia and Great Britain regarded his empire as the legitimate government of Mexico.
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May 8, 2017 00:48
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Arquinsiel posted:Any movie that has an Iowa pull a handbrake turn into a full broadside is alright by me TBH. Needed more Eurobeat, it already was a crossover between Initial D and a board game, might as well go all the way.
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May 8, 2017 01:18
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At this point, I'm pretty sure the entire EMALS is damned if you do, damned if you don't. I only did a few design classes in college before I dropped out, and I have nightmares about how even relatively small changes could multiply into massive headaches because of unforeseen consequences; something as integral to the ship as the EMALS probably would be a lot more complected than ctrl-x'ing the EMALS and ctrl-v'ing a steam catapult. We'll see what kind of bribe it takes before the president does yet another 180 on the project and demands that every ship be installed with EMALS. Rockopolis posted:So what kind of ship is the USS Donald Trump going to be? A repainted Admiral Kuznetsov class carrier, with full Twitter integration.
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May 12, 2017 00:40
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Grand Prize Winner posted:We really need an 'ultimate bad book' list or something. There's this, the Gavin Menzies thing on Zheng He, uh, maybe one of the ones saying the Middle Ages didn't happen...? Anything by Nial Fergusson, in my own experience. This includes any articles he's written online.
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May 12, 2017 03:04
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BattleMoose posted:Consider how long it took western countries to build our institutions or how long it took to transition from absolutism rule to a representative democracy. Either way it occurred over centuries with a number of failed starts and a lot of bloodshed. It's worked out great, just look at bastion of freedom and democracy Iraq, which simultaneously proves that just going in and tossing money at problems with no plans is awesome because government intervention only adds inefficiency, better just to have one company do all of that instead. And being serious, even if you look at countries that went from a monarchy or dictatorship to a democracy, it is never an easy road, a general overview off the top of my head: Japan  - Tokugawa bakufu to Prussian-style constitution to repressive empire to modern democracy and it only took a civil war, a lost world war and a whole lot of assassinations, protests that bordered on revolutions, an actual rebellion by the samurai in Kyushu and the US backing up the government after WWIIMexico  - Viceroyalty to Empire to federal republic, followed by a centralized republic under a series of strongmen which is marked by the frontiers seceding and Santa Ana becoming president multiple times as well as losing the entirety of the northern provinces to the US, then another federal republic, followed by another empire, a 35 year presidential dictatorship ending in a revolution and finally a de-facto single party state that literally only ended in 2000, when for the first time in literally a century there was a peaceful transfer of power between one party to another. Also still marred by insane amounts of corruption and other mostly institutional problems, but so far no one's coup'd the president so by the low standard of the previous Mexican democratic experiments it is a great success. France  - In between the first and fifth republics there have been two empires and a restoration of the monarchy under two different branches of the Bourbons. South Korea :thereisnoSKemote:- I've been looking into this recently and it is basically a succession of strongmen backed by the US until 1987 when a mass protest movement finally outs the junta Taiwan :cryingKMT:- Presidential dictatorship under Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT until his death, the first opposition party isn't formed until 1986 and martial law is not repealed on Taiwan until 1987. And in most of these, the pressure for democracy came from the bottom up, and weren't put in place by an outside country, so there was already grassroots support for the democratic support, which obviously makes building institutions that will support the democratically elected government easier. The one example I have of a foreign country successfully implementing a democratic government was in Japan, where they already had a democratic tradition and institutions in place, so McArthur had somewhere to work within rather than building everything from the ground up. Also they had literally been bombed into rubble, which made the population more open to trying the foreign way of governing, since the brutal repression of the Empire had brought them to ruin. At least, that's the impression I got from my great-aunt, I don't actually have any scholarly sources on that last point. Vincent Van Goatse posted:Don't say that name. I said his name in front of a mirror three times, and now he won't stop yelling at me about how the White Man's Burden means the British Empire was both cool and good. Edit: since when has  been an emote? It accurately sums up how France went from absolute monarchy to republic
Don Gato fucked around with this message at 10:28 on May 12, 2017 |
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May 12, 2017 10:20
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Coolguye posted:Hello thread, I have a rather specific question. Off the top of my head, the USS Midway (CVA-41) saw action in Vietnam, Korea, the first Taiwan Strait Crisis and the first Gulf War before it was decommissioned in '92. It's bound to have an interesting logbook.
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May 13, 2017 19:59
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Coolguye posted:Available logbooks for the Midway range from 1962 to 1974. I'll start scanning some of these, but if you happen to come up with specific events it was involved in, please let me know so I can refine the search! It did have the last air to air kill in Vietnam, wiki says it was 12Jan73, and it also had its first air to air kill in Vietnam on 17 June 65. I'm pretty sure they had a plane score a gun kill that year but wiki disagrees with me. Also it was involved in the final evacuation of Saigon, not sure the exact days it was off the coast of Vietnam.
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May 14, 2017 03:17
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Waroduce posted:also the american engineers and business men that went over? I forget if it was this thread or its predecessor, but someone did a massive series of effort posts about just that. I'd link exactly where but I'm phoneposting and search doesn't like me.
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May 15, 2017 04:18
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Down Periscope is widely known as the most accurate submarine movie ever made. Having talked to and drank with far too many submariners, I will vouch for it and say that movie is 100% accurate. Something about being locked into a metal tube either only attracts crazy people, or it breaks people.
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May 16, 2017 23:52
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I was hoping it would be entirely about Churchill trying to get the Allies to do a naval invasion, following him from WWI and his plan to invade Northern Germany, to the debacle at Gallipoli and then finally going through every possible permutation of a naval landing until D-Day. Vincent Van Goatse posted:This is going to suck, and I'll probably see it on opening day. Hell, same.
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May 18, 2017 08:47
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Disinterested posted:Tobasco Sauce on Everything - A Modern Disinterested posted:Constipation: The Life of a Soldier. )
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May 20, 2017 05:06
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My experience with MPs (well, air force security forces but similar enough) is that they drive my drunk rear end back to the dorms if I drink too much and do something stupid, and are way more polite than any civilian police have been to me despite the fact I assume all of them hate me for the aforementioned reason. Talking to them, they mostly tell me they're disappointed they are cops first because they thought that SF meant that they go outside the wire a lot. I can't really tell you much else because my job is about as far from that as you can get.
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May 30, 2017 22:39
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Nebakenezzer posted:I have not seen it, but - Honestly doesn't seem that far fetched. I'm surprised they used an actual historical person as a villain, must be because WWI is more obscure than the second one.
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Jun 2, 2017 21:23
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Yvonmukluk posted:That poor horse. Poor Butters, thought of tanks and died.
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Jun 2, 2017 22:01
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The future of reenactors with a bad sense of history limp_cheese posted:Does anybody know how the wounded were cared for or treated at various points in history? Not just hospital poo poo, but how they were taken care of after the fact when they went home. From my understanding simple wounds were fatal because of poor hygiene, lovely tools, and limited medical knowledge. Afterwards the wounded were made to fend for themselves without much of a stipend , if any. Like you said, it depends. If you can get to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, there is a Museum of Army Medicine there which is actually really cool and a good overview of how the US treated the wounded on the battlefield and transported them to the hospital since the Civil War. I might have some pictures but they're on another computer which is currently a few thousand miles away and I completely forgot to upload them somewhere I could access them From what I understand, until the formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863, there wasn't really any organization that would treat wounded soldiers, either post-battle or post-war, but I'm only am familiar with how modern CASEVAC works.
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Jun 9, 2017 07:22
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Asimov posted:The thread title reminded me of a line I read in "1776" regarding the inebriation of (I think) Massachusetts soldiers besieging Boston. War. War never changes.
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Jun 13, 2017 07:53
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Phobophilia posted:im not familiar with russian enough to know if there is a slang association between organ and giant throbbing dick in that language The Russians didn't call it Stalin's Organ, that was the Germans. Katyusha is just a cutesy diminutive of the name Yekaterina, which was pretty surprising to me but I guess if the NKVD wont tell you the name, just call it the first thing that comes to mind Edit: a quick check tells me that similar systems are also called Stalin's organs in other languages, and apparently the modern BM-31 is called Andryusha. Do Russians just like cutesy nicknames or is the internet lying to me? Don Gato fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Jun 15, 2017 |
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Jun 15, 2017 04:09
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Phanatic posted:Come to think of it, the name for the T34 Shermans with the MLRS mounted was "calliope," again because of the look and sound. Off the top of my head, Allied soldiers referred to the MP-40 as sounding like a sewing machine and the MG-42 was called Hitler's Buzzsaw partially due to its sound.
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Jun 15, 2017 05:24
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My grandpa forbid me from eating spam and vienna sausages because those were basically the only proteins he got in Manzanar. Its so strongly ingrained in me that even though I live in Hawaii and am surrounded by spam I still can't eat it, its like there's a mental block there.
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Jun 17, 2017 07:59
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I have an odd question, but does anyone have a good source on the Lille pocket in 1940? I just found out that 40,000 Frenchmen held off 7 divisions during the Fall of France and might have directly contributed to the sheer amount of men, but my brief googling found only a few clickbait articles and a woefully short wikipedia article. It seems depressingly obscure for something so important.
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Jun 30, 2017 07:00
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my dad posted:Yeeeeeeah, and that's on top of the whole thingie where you need to be alive to have rights, and, uh... Crime is committed by the living, so killing everyone brings down the crime rate to zero  . Plus everyone has equal rights when their skulls are used to build a pyramid as a warning to the next tribe over 
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Jul 6, 2017 20:18
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Ithle01 posted:Yeah of course, I'm well aware of that, but odds are that the army volunteer has to do the same job or even worse jobs than that for as low as one-tenth the pay and poo poo benefits after your discharge - at least that's what I hear, I've literally never heard a veteran claim they were well taken of after they left the military, but I don't have a large sample size to work with. Honestly the benefits afterwards are extremely hit or miss, as anyone in GiP would tell you, though broadly I will say that the VA is underfunded and undermanned and a lot of problems stem from that. The GI bill is pretty good, and when you are in you get 4500 dollars a year of tuition assistance, which combined with the Post 9/11 GI bill giving 36 months of school (really oversimplifying here) you can easily end up with a degree with little to no debt. Like, the benefits afterwards could be better and the new change to the pension system hurts people who want to stay in while helping people who get out, but it isn't complete rear end. Mostly. The base pay is rear end, but you add in the food and housing subsidies, cost of living adjustments, health insurance and life insurance it gets a lot more competitive. Not "holy poo poo I'm definitely gonna stay my full 20" competitive, but I hadn't had a job on the outside that let me live comfortably in Honolulu so its not bad. Still would never go and be a grunt, they just get poo poo on constantly as has happened historically since probably the Roman era. At least my pay has only been late twice in a three year period, which is a lot better than most jobs I've had.
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Jul 7, 2017 02:02
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Cyrano4747 posted:If you want a window into how antagonisms develop over generation then spill over due to a series of pressures the Hutu - Tutsi example is well documented and really enlightening Do you have specific sources or is looking at the citations on Wikipedia a decent start? Most of what I know is the general course of the genocide but I don't know where to start researching the background of it. Also I'm a bit wary of researching anything past the 60s. Also a related question for future reference, how do you figure what a good source is when you are studying an unfamiliar subject? I never took a college level history class, but I've always loved reading about history and in high school you really don't learn about what is and isn't a good source (I mean maybe they did but I never had to actually work hard to get good grades and kind of slept through most of my classes, which has really been biting me in the rear end since then).
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Aug 2, 2017 08:32
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This is an extremely loaded question, but it is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and I'd like to know what are generally considered good books about the atomic bombings? I have a personal connection to the bombing (not related to a survivor but long complicated story made short my great aunt was a nurse at Hiroshima and had some extremely strong opinions wrt nuclear weapons). But beyond the actual bombing* I don't know anything about the decisions that led up to it being dropped, and everything I've found is extremely politicized for obvious reasons, and any discussion it gets brought up in immediately devolves into people yelling past each other. I'm not so interested in discussion in this thread because I would rather not get the thread closed down. *fun story, my great aunt collected photos of Hiroshima for some morbid reason, and showed me photos of what it looks like when you are too close to a blast when I was 7. I couldn't sleep for weeks because I was afraid of ant walking crocodiles coming for me. Also don't look up ant walking crocodile of you are easily sickened because it is still one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen.
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Aug 10, 2017 04:40
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Wow, that didnt take long to get suggestions. Looks like my reading list has gotten much, much larger, thanks for the suggestions SlothfulCobra posted:Now I am torn between my urge to find out what on earth an "ant walking crocodile" and my worry that trying to find out would lead to something bad. My Japanese was always really bad so maybe my translation is off but they were the poor souls who were close enough to the blast to have every exposed inch of skin instantly burn and lost all their facial features as a result, but were too far away to have been killed instantly. They looked more like aliens or crocodiles and they slowly would shuffle towards rescue workers, or if they were lucky they would stumble into the river and drown. I was told the ant walking name came from their disturbing shuffle and the fact they walked in large lines, kind of like ants.
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Aug 10, 2017 07:59
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:tank destroyers did nothing Fixed for accuracy
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Aug 10, 2017 08:49
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