Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Tulip posted:

Figure out how to kick off the Spanish Flu in 1910 or so in the hopes that Europe is so demoralized about seeing their sons die by the millions that the war becomes impossible to sell.

This is genuinely adorable.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2021 13:05

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 17:47

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Foxtrot_13 posted:

Shhh, don't let the Scottish Nationalists hear you talk about how Scotland was an enthusiastic part of the Empire.

I don�t know that this is what you would call �a Scottish city making profits as part of an oppressive empire�, without making some huge leaps about who and what is profiting and if profit equals societal enthusiasm.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2021 23:49

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Uncle Enzo posted:

They probably should have done this. Wasn't reconstruction severely hampered by the fact that technically, legally speaking, the confederacy never existed? And then reconstruction failing led to the following 1.5 century+ of racial and economic problems since.

it�s super naive to think reconstruction could have meant the end of American racism. But yes, reconstruction failing was the first sign that the South had no intention of backing off it�s horrifying beliefs.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2021 00:31

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Arbite posted:

Yeah, that's where I first saw it and the exact same thing was just on The Expanse. I was just wondering if there was a real world example they might be drawing from.

remember both of those are fantasy series, so not necessarily trying to fully understand actual historical examples so much as echo them

# ¿ Dec 30, 2021 18:14

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

They decided to focus on Ottomans.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2022 20:38

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

lincoln was such a badass

# ¿ May 15, 2022 21:06

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Raenir Salazar posted:

Shouldn't it be Roman and Friends?

I don't think they've focused on Germany too much yet, no.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2022 20:44

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

one of the times i went to the improvised shakespeare company in chicago they did a rendition of Julius Sneezer.

okay that's my story

# ¿ Jun 19, 2022 20:30

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

SubG posted:

There's a lot of questionable politics baked into RRR (this is true of virtually all popular cinema everywhere, with regional variations just placing more or less emphasis on different bits) but lol at begrudging the right of anyone, much less India, to hate the British Empire.

careful, some posters here might start denying random British genocides again :v:

# ¿ Jul 20, 2022 03:00

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

HALTED BY THE BERSERK FIEND ........... HITLER

# ¿ Jul 20, 2022 04:57

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

HoI4 has poisoned a generation of amateur historians :negative:

# ¿ Jul 22, 2022 01:51

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Nessus posted:

I can't think of much to criticize Lafayette for that wasn't "he existed in a time and place and was not willing to push hard enough to self-destruct himself." I suppose you could condemn him for existing as the child of a nobleman.

john brown should be a hero and inspiration to us all imo

# ¿ Sep 11, 2022 03:50

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Libluini posted:

Only if you extend the definition of slavery to include more modern things like prison slavery, which is a separate issue. Otherwise, please list the places that still have American-style chattel slavery today.

huh???

# ¿ Sep 12, 2022 02:40

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Uncle Enzo posted:

The Ivory Coast

I don't think the level of brutality is as bad as say the prewar American South and certainly not plantation Haiti, but yeah you got beatings, shackles, and buying and selling.

Also American prison slavery is bad enough the answer is to snuff it outright, not compare it to this or that.

i think you misinterpreted my "huh???", it was an expression of disbelief at the post i was quoting, not thinking "yeah we beat slavery hundreds of years ago, way to go team" :shobon:

# ¿ Sep 12, 2022 03:31

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Koramei posted:

There�s been some interesting pushback in recent years (on the pop-history side, I know this is all relatively old in actual scholarship) as less Eurocentric models for historical development have gone from fringe to dominant in history nerd haunts and people are more willing to look towards at least East Asia�s early modern history as every bit as rich and dynamic and meaningful in its own right as Europe�s. Which is obviously great on the one hand, but then means there�s also a willingness to just like, throw out literally all prior assumptions and assume all European innovations were bullshit or something.

I guess this is just the metaphorical pendulum I�m finally old enough to be noticing but it�s a weird feeling when I remember arguing vehemently against Eurocentrism a few years ago in basically the same context as I�m now on the opposite side of.

i mean, understanding things with nuance is i think all you can do here, and not even bad besides

# ¿ Sep 24, 2022 04:58

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Mr. Grapes! posted:

I wonder how much of that actually went on in total and got reported as KIA. I imagine it's a lot better for the army at least to have the family think their boy died rushing an enemy MG nest than blowing his head off while cleaning a captured revolver or something. It lets the family turn their grief and anger towards the enemy rather than the incompetence of command for a preventable accident, or having to think of their kid as a klutz.

this is really weird to unpack, because "cleaning the gun" is a very famous euphemism for suicide already. i think most families would rather their children not die and weird nationalism-based wars not happen

# ¿ Oct 9, 2022 05:50

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

also pointing to DNA as proof of conquest or whatever is dumb esp when u think about how small ruling populations are w/r/t native populations. that was Very Silly!

# ¿ Oct 17, 2022 09:32

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

MikeC posted:

I was clearly being facetious. The thesis being presented by Cryo, Tomm, and others is that it is worse to have waterways such as rivers and oceans since they are conduits for invasion and hinder the defender.

Only goons would find this statement controversial.

But Tomm and co will cite things like English kings coming back from exile as proof that oceans and waterways actually hurt defenders or made them more vulnerable ignoring things like the fact that the Romans held a river line as the defensive frontier for almost half a millennium or that the Mongols managed to conquer almost the entire Eurasian landmass but losing a couple of fleets to storms made them decide that maybe Japan wasn't really worth it.

As I said, who am I to question such great minds? Carry on.

lol you can apologize and just hold an L for a bit and everyone forgives you and forgets and stops caring. instead you give us a meltdown in the milhist thread of all things! wild. why do this?

# ¿ Oct 20, 2022 07:10

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

they didn't swap sides as others put better.
boomers dying won't fix anything gen x is getting more conservative as they age unfortunately despite previous demographics suggesting that wouldn't happen
using the term servant of capital is fine but def not fitting in this thread
military history itself is boring political economic history is cool and interesting
you should play victoria 3 this tuesday it's gonna be a lot of fun

# ¿ Oct 23, 2022 07:27

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Nenonen posted:

Against France with 100k guys, mind you. If Britain had changed sides then Gibraltar strait would have been under Axis control and the Royal Navy wouldn't have given any assistance to US Navy in crossing the ocean. And any German forces in Africa would be fully concentrated in Morocco. An invasion of mainland Europe with million men would have been quite tricky without Britain as a staging area and an active ally.

Obviously a full British capitulation doesn't seem likely after 1940. But things were still tight at the start of 1942. Only after Midway, Alamein and Stalingrad the tide turned clearly. But for some time there must have been concerns about Russia suing for peace like in 1918. Britain dropping out would have been bad, but without Soviet Union, how could the west have defeated Germany short of bombing all of Central Europe into radioactive rubble? Lend & Lease was meant to ensure that that wouldn't happen.

this feels a bit like pushing things too far in a "it was a tight-run thing" direction - like, things were not still tight at the start of 1942. by the time America had entered the war, it had really and truly been decided. not bc of American bravery or ethos or whatever, just the sheer industrial might and manpower meant it was a wrap, period. combined with the Soviet Union having survived the grim fall/winter of 42 it really was over.

not to understate the incredibly hard work that went into things moving forward, of course.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2022 08:06

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Xiahou Dun posted:

Oooof. This is one of those questions that seems really simple but is profoundly not and as phrased is kind of un-answerable because the framing has a lot of assumptions in it that make it impossible.

Okay, so first, German as a capital-G thing doesn't exist. There isn't an actual thing you can point to and say, "Hey, look at this German language over here, it's still got a genitive case, I swear!" This isn't unique to German, all languages are just abstractions over groups of speakers*, but German is an even bigger mess to talk about because the idea of sitting down and having a standard German everyone speaks is a relatively new thing with minimal enforcement outside of "Look we gotta write newspapers in something, guys". Pretty much all educated "German" speakers can communicate in a standard form of German for writing and doing their taxes and listening to the news and possibly speaking at work, etc., but will also have at least one variety they speak casually with friends, family, neighbors, etc. and the latter might be very, very different from the former. Every language is gonna have different levels of politeness and variation between social settings like this (I guarantee you don't talk to your boss, your mom and your significant other the same), but in many parts of the world these varieties can get really, really tenuously connected or connected not at all. This relationship if called diglossia ("two tongues"), with Germans being a relatively mild example of it because the more extreme (and very common) form is for the languages to not be related at all, like Spanish and Guarani in Guatemala where the vast, vast majority of the whole country (over 90%) is fluent in both. (Guarani is an indigenous language of South America, hopefully the reader will just trust me it's not related to Spanish.)

Hey guess what happens when a bunch of Hebrew speakers live in "German"-speaking areas for a long time.

This is why at no point am I going to say that Yiddish is a dialect of German because it will piss some people off a lot. You can imagine why that would be a politically and socially charged thing to say. Because it is and it isn't depending on what you mean by that, with the giant question of how useful that is as a statement. And then you have the question of which Yiddish you mean.

Yiddish has a bunch of bits and bobs from Germanic languages. It walks and talks (har har) like a High German Dialect**, I can understand Yiddish pretty well if the person I'm speaking with is patient, but I'm also a speaker of a High German Dialect**. It certainly looks like a kind of German in many regards. But it also has a poo poo ton of its own stuff and a bunch of loans from Hebrew.

So what does that make it? Enh, it depends. The neutral way to refer to is to just give a description, e.g. "Yiddish is a language variety spoken by [population] that has [feature that we're talking about] influenced by various High German dialects and Hebrew". If you're actually trying to make a claim about say, German dialectology or the influence of templatic morphology on V2 cross-linguistically, then you just say that. The point of this kind of vocabulary is to be descriptive and informative, not to put everything in neat little boxes.

How mutually intelligible are Yiddish and a given kind of German? Enh, how blue is the ocean? You're asking a quantified question about an intangible. They're probably more mutually intelligible than English and Kaqchikel but less than two speakers of the same kind of German. You can't really measure how mutually intelligible things are because people communicate without language or by making up whole new languages if they really need to and they're clever enough, but some people will never understand and they'll throw a weird (often racist) snit because of completely made up things that have nothing to do with the language variety they're interacting with.

With all that background? Maybe comparable-ish to the difference between Spanish and Portuguese? To which you might respond "Wait, which Spanish and which Portuguese and I heard that Portuguese speakers can often understand Spanish but not the other way around..." And I say : exactly. It's hard.

I need to stop doing giant language posts. Sorry.

*And even then, what "counts" as a German speaker? It's not like there's a point system or something. Just using this thread as an example it's hard : sure there's ones that are easy to count (Libliuni is, I believe, a German citizen living in the Federal Republic of Germany who group up speaking German vs pick a random monolingual poster for the "not German" pile), but what about like me vs. Cyrano? Cyrano speaks grown-up standard German he learned at school and from living in Germany and can read and write fluently as far as I know (whatever that means) ; I spoke a non-standard variety of German natively and monolingually until I was 5 and I still talk it with my giant extended family, but I never really gave a poo poo about standard German until I was in my 20's and decided I wanted to learn how to like, actually read : is one of us "more" of a German speaker than the other? What does that even mean. And keep in mind, it's entirely possible that I could understand Cyrano (I'm used to figuring out ~~Breissdeitsch~~Standard German) but he couldn't understand my bizzaro hayseed dialect that has a bunch of extra vowels, different grammar and stopped believing in the letters "l" and "r" because idk they're Protestant sympathizers. (Toy example, I think Cyrano actually spent time in Baden so he's been exposed to a less extreme form.)

**I've mentioned it before but it's obscure and enraging so a refresher : because people loving suck the German word for Standard German, Hochdeutsch, literally means "high German" but the English language vocabulary for German dialects was created independently (because it predates the nation of Germany by a bit) in reference to altitude relative to the Alps. Thus Hochdeutsch, Standard German, "high German", is a Low German dialect because it's from the North by the sea and my German and Yiddish and Swiss are all High German dialects because this is why we can't have nice things.

this is a way better read than the usual "this one obscure piece of metal attached to a tank is 2 inches thicker than the typical obscure piece of metal attached to a tank destroyer which is completely4rwegtn0w2q", thank you.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2022 16:46

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Tomn posted:

Question: When the news about the Portuguese finding a route to India started filtering out across Europe, how much of an impact did the altered trade flows have on the Ottomans? Did it affect their economy or tax income to any significant degree, or alter their strategic planning?

This is literally the subject of literature, but a tl;dr is that the growth of trade to the far east was just that - growth, and not really zero sum in that it cost the Ottomans in that immediate regard. They did devote significant resources to defeating the Portuguese nonetheless, to mixed success.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2023 07:05

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Typo posted:

In hindsight the best option for everyone would to have being if the Qing emperors voluntarily relegate themselves to a figurehead role on the model of British constitutional monarchy when they saw the writing on the wall by 1900 or so

this is gay black Hitler territory to be fair though. The Qing at this point would not have been capable of stable reforms if they even had the will.

# ¿ May 5, 2023 22:13

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

bleak walkers rear end philosophy in this thread

# ¿ May 13, 2023 06:12

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

fwiw the Germans knew they were being recorded, so some of what they said could be done with that in mind

# ¿ May 13, 2023 19:44

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Cyrano4747 posted:

They could run nighttime recon even late in the war.

A single bomber at night could have gotten over London even in the final days.

i don't think you could reliably guarantee WHICH bomber. you would need a squadron and if you're building that many A-bombs we've, again, firmly entered this fantastical world where unicorns prance around or w/e

e: the tone here is more flippant than i intend, i'm just emphasizing that doesn't "solve for" that problem

# ¿ May 14, 2023 07:23

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Fell Fire posted:

Was there any particular reason why Britain and France didn't declare war on the USSR when they invaded Poland? Did they think it would be too much of a fight?

they were already at war with germany tf do you mean

# ¿ Jun 7, 2023 03:30

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

CommonShore posted:

In the current ACOUP series Devereaux details a few campaigns between the Romans and Hellenistic kingdoms in Macedonia and Anatolia where it looked like the Romans were going to be walking into a meat grinder and then they walk away with the victory and trivially few casualties.

Ha! I'd like to see ol' Laevinus wriggle his way out of THIS jam!

# ¿ Apr 11, 2024 05:37

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Arbite posted:

Vittorio Emanuele: It's me Kaiser!

Franz Joseph: Aww son of a bitch.

Vittorio Emanuele: It's me Kaiser, it was me, all along Kaiser!

lmfao

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:25

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Cessna posted:

Yes, but that was a joke. If a European power - especially the UK - had seriously decided to confront the USA and start setting up colonies in Central or South America in the early 19th century the US Navy would have lasted about half an hour against them. The Monroe Doctrine was posturing on behalf of the US, no more. The ONLY reason it survived was because it was in line with the UK's own interests of Pax Britannica.

i don't think any country would seriously consider the insane amounts of money the logistics involved would require back then, so that's a moot point imo

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 17:32

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 17:47

Radia: Jul 14, 2021; And someday, together.. We'll shine.

Cessna posted:

Exactly this. The Monroe Doctrine worked because it aligned with Britain's interests.

sure but i think people are just pointing out you have to enter gay black hitler territory for monroe doctrine to have ever been tested to begin with

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 19:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...