Plutonis posted:

Yeah turns out having the best trained and equipped army in the middle east means jack poo poo when you are fighting anything other than civilian hospitals and extremely lovely arab professional armies.

prefect posted:

Listening to the "American Nazis" episode now, and I love it when Dolan gets into the Civil War history. It's so clear he really cares about it, and knows it deeply.

Hedenius posted:

One of my favorite columns of his is his one on Adam Gurowski. It actually made me get the diary and read it which I highly recommend.

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/adam-gurowski/

prefect posted:

This is good; thanks.


"You’ll notice that Gurowski is so angry here at the dotard Scott that he uses the worst insult any European military commentator can think of: He compares Scott to the Austrians."

quote:

I saw him once more at close range. This was in the autumn of 1932, as the fever began to take hold of Germany. Friedrich von Mücke and I were dining at the Osteria Bavaria in Munich when Hitler entered and crossed the restaurant to the table next to ours—alone, by the way, and without his usual bodyguard. There he sat, now a power among the Germans … say, felt himself observed by us, and critically examined, and as a result became uncomfortable. His face took on the sullen expression of a minor bureaucrat who has ventured into a place which he would not generally enter, but now that he is there demands for his good money ‘that he be served and treated every bit as well as the fine gentleman over there …’

There he sat, a raw-vegetable Genghis Khan, a teetotalling Alexander, a womanless Napoleon, an effigy of Bismarck who would certainly have had to go to bed for four weeks if he had ever tried to eat just one of Bismarck’s breakfasts.

Thug Lessons posted:

snoremac posted:

Some War Nerd/Dolan articles I like:

Tom Clancy is Not One of Us
Reagan's Cheshire Snarl
A Million Pieces of poo poo (Dolan noticed James Frey's biography was fraudulent before anyone else but didn't get credit for it)
Jonathan Franzen: "Will Rim Bobos for Book-of-the-Month Fame"
Thomas Friedman: The Empire's Useful Idiot
Lord Byron: The Exile's Patron Saint


Specifically about wars:
Land of the Flies
Why Sherman was right to burn Atlanta
Congo: a Tutsi empire interrupted once again by do-gooders

quote:

Leigh actually thinks he’s fixing blame—blame!—for Sherman’s perfectly sensible, conventional action, the burning of a major rail center in his rear before setting out unsupported across enemy territory.

What next? Will the NYT dig up some crusty tenth-generation Tory sulking in the suburbs of Toronto to ask, “Who Killed All Those Innocent Redcoats on Bunker Hill?” Or a sob story by the Imperial Japanese Navy’s last surviving sailor asking, “Who Sank All Our Carriers?”

quote:

But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a “fat otter”: “There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.”

Now, can anyone tell me what a “fat otter with a flat, armored tail” actually is? That’s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the “large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch” would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!

Any kindergartner would know that, and anyone with a flicker of life would be delighted to see a beaver and its home. But for Frey, a very stupid and very vain man, the “fat otter” is nothing but another mirror in which to adore his Terrible Fate. He engages the beaver in the most dismal of adolescent rhetorical interrogations:

“Hey, Fat Otter.

He stares at me.

You want what I got?

He stares at me.

I’ll give you everything.

Stares at me….”

And so on, for another half-page. You want to slap the sulking spoiled brat. The Fat Otter should’ve slapped him with its “flat, armored tail” and then chewed his leg off and used it to fortify its “Pile with monstrous protrusions.”

Dreylad posted:

What a stupid, petty squabble.

Leftist circular firing squad etc

It's too bad because Wilson leaves the interview on an up note, saying he sees various left groups working together and organizing for once, and that they dwarf Nazi protestors in terms of numbers.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

https://twitter.com/TheWarNerd/status/910666950052806656

Thug Lessons posted:

"Mediocre lunacy" is a great way to describe late liberalism

Sephyr posted:

My exact thought when I read it. It's not even a wild, interesting lunacy. It's about re-fighting every war that has already been won to stomp harder on the losers and throw more confetti onto themselves.

Atrocious Joe posted:

Didn't finish the rest of the ep yet, but I teared up when Alex Zaichik described how the indigenous people in Peru poisoned by oil companies were talking about the resistance at Standing Rock