worn-out basic-ass historical references on twitter

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > worn-out basic-ass historical references on twitter

Aglet56: Sep 1, 2011

it's difficult to explain, but there's a certain type of post on twitter that basically just serves to demonstrate that the author knows about a particular historical fact or topic, but the topic in question is incredibly well-known and basic. people across the political spectrum will cheerfully post a picture of a ww2 plane with bullet holes any time the topic of survivorship bias comes up. people seem convinced that this shows intelligence and historical acumen when it really makes you look like you learned everything you know from cracked.com

here are a few examples of historical reference memes that are played out to the point of pain:

- The aforementioned survivorship bias plane

https://twitter.com/Duderichy/status/1660291386883571714

https://twitter.com/upzone_CA/status/1633000123516219392

https://twitter.com/oncloud_e/status/1665074708239499265

- The demon core (for some reason, this seems to have recently become a furry/anime meme)

https://twitter.com/FruitzJam/status/1695665400325849217

https://twitter.com/gahhnie/status/1695819478427386100

- charles ii of spain

https://twitter.com/JonnElledge/status/1648454579334569985

https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1648453714183864321

if you have other good examples, by all means, post them. i love a good wiki binge, but nothing makes me roll my eyes like people digging up entry-level wiki binge entries and treating them like they've struck gold

Aglet56 has issued a correction as of 20:55 on Sep 6, 2023

# ? Sep 6, 2023 07:20

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 2, 2024 03:19

HORSE-SLAUGHTERER: Nov 11, 2020; H O R S E - S L A U G H T E R E R

idk what any of those things are sorry about all your twitter friends bad posts..

:horse:

# ? Sep 6, 2023 12:14

Nosfereefer: Jun 15, 2011; IF YOU FIND THIS POSTER OUTSIDE BYOB, PLEASE RETURN THEM. WE ARE VERY WORRIED AND WE MISS THEM

Those are some p interesting facts op, ty

# ? Sep 6, 2023 12:28

double nine: Aug 8, 2013

I had never heard of any of this, ty

# ? Sep 6, 2023 13:05

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

I post goatse

# ? Sep 6, 2023 13:08

Weka: May 5, 2019; That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.

https://twitter.com/Thatsmy91000715/status/1699368882933244097

bet you didn't know this one op

# ? Sep 6, 2023 13:32

Weka: May 5, 2019; That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.

my bony fealty posted:

I post goatse

sick of all these selfies

# ? Sep 6, 2023 13:34

Pentecoastal Elites: Feb 27, 2007

whew chile

# ? Sep 6, 2023 17:07

Pepe Silvia Browne: Jan 1, 2007

people do that "it's actually sparkling fascism" "it's actually sparkling racism" "it's actually sparkling pedophilia" joke that is just repeating this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE4NyXL5JAQ

# ? Sep 6, 2023 17:13

Pepe Silvia Browne: Jan 1, 2007

anyways it's not really a historical reference but I'm pretty sick of the "ya don't gotta hand it to ISIS" format and would like to never see someone attempt to do a joke with it again

# ? Sep 6, 2023 17:14

In Training: Jun 28, 2008

wow people are posting dumb poo poo on Twitter. Stop the presses lol

# ? Sep 6, 2023 17:55

Pepe Silvia Browne: Jan 1, 2007

In Training posted:

wow people are posting dumb poo poo on Twitter. Stop the presses lol

what presses

# ? Sep 6, 2023 18:04

HashtagGirlboss: Jan 4, 2005

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

people do that "it's actually sparkling fascism" "it's actually sparkling racism" "it's actually sparkling pedophilia" joke that is just repeating this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE4NyXL5JAQ

Unless they posted it more than a month ago it�s just sparkling X.com jokes :smug:

# ? Sep 6, 2023 18:10

Woke Mind Virus: Aug 22, 2005

karl marx

# ? Sep 6, 2023 18:18

lobster shirt: Jun 14, 2021

this post is like that time freakin napoleon conducted the motherbitchin battle of austerlitz!! twice!

# ? Sep 6, 2023 20:42

super sweet best pal: Nov 18, 2009

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

anyways it's not really a historical reference but I'm pretty sick of the "ya don't gotta hand it to ISIS" format and would like to never see someone attempt to do a joke with it again

For most of those the "The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point" guy would be more appropriate.

# ? Sep 6, 2023 21:13

Ohtori Akio: Jul 15, 2022

gas

# ? Sep 6, 2023 21:20

Cuttlefush: Jan 15, 2014; Gleichheit soll gedeihen

the cockpit, wings, and tail

# ? Sep 6, 2023 21:24

Pf. Hikikomoriarty: Feb 15, 2003; RO YNSHO; Slippery Tilde

let people enjoy things like the demon core imo

# ? Sep 6, 2023 22:14

Megamissen: Jul 19, 2022; any post can be a kannapost
if you want it to be

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

people do that "it's actually sparkling fascism" "it's actually sparkling racism" "it's actually sparkling pedophilia" joke that is just repeating this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE4NyXL5JAQ

ive gotten very tired of this one

# ? Sep 6, 2023 22:16

Pepe Silvia Browne: Jan 1, 2007

Megamissen posted:

ive gotten very tired of this one

it sucks!

# ? Sep 6, 2023 22:18

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

this thread is like birdshit island

quote:

It was said that the islands gave off a stench so intense that they were difficult to approach. They were a clutch of dry, granitic mounds thirteen miles off the Peruvian shore, about five hundred miles south of Lima on the west coast of South America. [...] Predators and prey both are preyed upon by the Peruvian booby, cormorant, and pelican. All three have nested on the Chincha islands for millennia. Over time they have covered the islands with a layer of guano as much as 150 feet thick.

[...]

Supplying European farmers with guano would involve transporting large quantities of excrement across the Atlantic, a project that understandably failed to enthuse shipping companies. Within several decades, though the picture changed. Agricultural reformers throughout Europe had to begun to worry that the ever-more intense agriculture necessary to feed growing populations was exhausting the soil. As harvests leveled off and even decreased, they looked for something to restore the land: fertilizer.

At the time, the best known soil additive was bone meal, made by pulverizing bones from slaughterhouses. Bushels of bones went to grinding factories in Britain, France, and Germany. Demand ratcheted up, driven by fears of soil depletion. Bone dealers supplied the factories from increasingly untoward sources, including the recent battlefields of Waterloo and Austerlitz. "It is now ascertained beyond a doubt, by actual experiment upon an extensive scale, that a dead solider is a most valuable article of commerce,' remarked the London Observer in 1822. The newspaper noted that there was no reason to believe that graver robbers were limiting themselves to battlefields. "For aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread."

From this perspective, avian feces began to seem like a reasonable item of commerce. A few bags of guano appeared in European ports in the mid-1830s. Then Justus von Liebig weighed in. A pioneering organic chemist, Liebig was the first to explain plants' dependence on nutrients,, especially nitrogen. In his treatise Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and physiology (1840), Liebig criticized the use of bone fertilizer, which has little nitrogen. Guano was another story [...]

Guano mania took hold. [...] In forty years, Peru exported about 13 million tons of guano, [receiving] for it approximately $13 billion in today's dollars. It was the beginning of today's input-intensive agriculture - the practice of transferring huge amounts of crop nutrients from one place to another, distant place according to plans dictated by scientific research.

Hoping to take maximum advantage of the guano rush, Peru nationalized the Chinchas. Soon it discovered that nobody wanted to work on the islands. Except for birds, their only inhabitants were bats, scorpions, spiders, ticks, and biting flies. Not a single plant grew on their barren slopes. Worse, the islands had no water, every drop had to be shipped in. Because the land was blanketed in guano, miners worked, ate, and slept on shelves of ancient excrement. So little rain fell that the soluble materials in the guano never washed away - it remained studded with crystals of ammonia nitrate, which broke in corrosive clouds around miners' shovels. Powdery an acrid, the guano went into miners' carts, which were pushed up rails to a depot atop one of the seaside cliffs. From the cliff,. men dumped tons of excrement through a long canvas tube directly into the bellies of the vessels below. Slamming into the hold, guano dust exploded from the hatchways, shoruding the ship in a toxic fog. Workers wore masks made from hemp, smeared with tar, one visitor noted:

quote:
but the guano mocks at such weak defenses...[T]hey are unable to remain below longer than twenty minutes at one time. They are then relieved by another party, and return on deck perfectly naked, streaming with perspiration, and with their brown skins thickly coated with guano.

The government could have paid high wages to get workers to endure these terrible conditions, but that would have cut into profits. Instead it stocked the islands with a mix of convicts, army deserters, and African slaves. This arrangement proved unsatisfactory: the convicts and deserters killed each other, and the slaves were so valuable that their mainland owners did not wish to part with them.

In 1849 Peru gave up trying to run the mines itself and awarded an exclusive concession to Domingo Elias, Peru's biggest cotton grower and one of its principal slave owners. [...] In return for the monopoly, Elias was supposed to mine guano with his own slaves, but he, too, was reluctant to take them away from his cotton fields. He induced the government to subsidize merchants who imported immigrants. Prominent among these subsidized importers was Domingo Elias. By the time the law passed his agents were already in Fujian, waving labor contracts in the faces of illiterate villagers.

In standard indenture practice, the contracts promised the Chinese would pay for their passage by working, typically for eight years, in the newly discovered California gold fields. (The actual destination was not mentioned.) The ruse was plausible: agents for US firms were in Fujian at the same time, telling a similar lie as they sought indentured servants to build railroads. People who signed the bogus Peruvian contract were conducted to bleak human warehouses in Amoy (now called Xiamen, on an island across from the river from Yue-gang), and later, Macao. People who refused to sign were often kidnapped and shipped to the same warehouses. In these dark confines slavers burned the letter C - for California, their ostensible destination - into the backs of their ears. No longer were the men described as workers. Their new name was zhuzai, 'little pigs.' "None were let outside," wrote the Shanghai historian Wu, Ruozeng. "Those who resisted were whipped; any who tried to escape were killed."

[...] Peru represented the worst passage, the direst conditions, the most dreaded destination. Ultimately at least 100 000 Chinese were taken there. Conditions en route can be compared to those in the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps one out of eight zhuzai died. As on the Atlantic slave ships, revolts were common. Eleven mutinies are known to have occurred on Peru-bound vessels; at least five bloodily succeeded.

[...]At any given time between one and two thousand were on the Chincha Islands. In classic divide-and-conquer fashion, Elias forestalled rebellion by setting his African slaves as overseers over his Chinese slaves and holding both to strict deadlines. Spasms of cruelty, slave upon slave, were the inevitable result. Guano miners swung their picks up to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, to fulfill their assigned daily quotas (as much as five tons of guano); two-thirds of their pay was deducted for room (reed huts) and board (a cup of maize with some bananas). Failure to meet the daily quota was rewarded with a five-foot rawhide whip. Minor infractions were punished by torture. Escape from the islands was impossible. Suicide was frequent. One overseer told a New York Times correspondent that:

quote:
more than sixty had killed themselves during the year,...chiefly by throwing themselves from the cliffs. They are buried, as they lived, like so many dogs. I saw one who had been drowned - it was not known whether accidentally or not - lying on the guano, when I first went ashore. All the morning, his dead body lay in the sun; in the afternoon, they had covered it in a few inches, and there it lies, along with many similar heaps, within a few yards of where they were digging.

So many Chinese died that overseers marked off an acre of guano as a cemetery.

Journalistic expos�s of guano slavery created an international scandal that gave the Lima government an excuse to eject Elias and renegotiate the guano contract with someone else, thus procuring a second round of bribes. Fulminating against the evils of official corruption, Elias sought to regain his lucrative concession by twice staging a coup d'�tat. Both attempts failed. In 1857 he tried the legal route, running for president without success.

# ? Sep 6, 2023 22:39

sitchensis: Mar 4, 2009

Dreylad posted:

this thread is like birdshit island

huh. had no idea this existed. interesting.

# ? Sep 6, 2023 23:09

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

Dreylad posted:

this thread is like birdshit island

Sir, This Is A Wendy's

# ? Sep 7, 2023 00:29

rabble rabble: Mar 24, 2015; Nap Ghost

oh yeah? well the jerk store called and they're running out of YOU

# ? Sep 7, 2023 05:20

DarkSithLord: Apr 14, 2023; by Fluffdaddy

lobster shirt posted:

this post is like that time freakin napoleon conducted the motherbitchin battle of austerlitz!! twice!

lol

# ? Sep 7, 2023 06:51

FrancisFukyomama: Feb 4, 2019

that Finnish sniper

# ? Sep 7, 2023 12:26

palindrome: Feb 3, 2020

this is unfortunate, but sadly predictable. after all, "Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It."

palindrome has issued a correction as of 13:12 on Sep 7, 2023

# ? Sep 7, 2023 13:07

DarkSithLord: Apr 14, 2023; by Fluffdaddy

i really didn't expect to have a "worn-out basic-rear end historical references on twitter" thread on my 2023 bingo card but here we are i guess

# ? Sep 7, 2023 17:30

AxGrap: Jan 11, 2005; ☝☯ Ŧ𝓤𝒸Ҝ 𝓨𝕠𝔲! 🐼👽

DarkSithLord posted:

i really didn't expect to have a "worn-out basic-rear end historical references on twitter" thread on my 2023 bingo card but *checks notes* here we are i guess

# ? Sep 7, 2023 17:35

Pentecoastal Elites: Feb 27, 2007

no one:
absolutely no one:
worn-out basic-rear end historical references on twitter: unpopular opinion this thread lowkey goated and slay fr fr? not my rear end! sksksksksksksksks

# ? Sep 7, 2023 20:10