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ninjahedgehog posted:Quoting this not only for the — 'ow you zay — incroyable French accent but also a followup. Québécois and english units in the canadian army were (are?) separated. That said, le Régiment de la Chaudière landed on D-Day and had the happy coincidence of sounding bizarrely similar to the norman locals. TooMuchAbstraction posted:French does have spelling rules, and once you get a middling-sized vocabulary you can make a pretty good guess at how to pronounce a word you've read, or how to spell a word you've heard. Those spelling rules are just inordinately fond of letters that affect how other letters are pronounced rather than contributing directly themselves. learners also suffer from the fact that modern spoken french does not really resemble written academic french other than being both technically correct french, so even if you're on top of your french class you're going to sound all "greetings fellow kids" as soon as you talk to a french person. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Aug 31, 2019 |
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Aug 31, 2019 01:06
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Mexican war of independence was kind of funny in that it started with peasants rising up against a cruelly explotative colonial system and ended with the colonial elites declaring independence because they feared that the unelected central government might enact reforms to curb their worst excesses.
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Aug 31, 2019 01:09
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sullat posted:Mexican war of independence was kind of funny in that it started with peasants rising up against a cruelly explotative colonial system and ended with the colonial elites declaring independence because they feared that the unelected central government might enact reforms to curb their worst excesses. I mean it was started by Criollo elites who got arrested and then Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla turned out to be really good at rallying angry peasants when he went ahead and started the war anyway. Unfortunately not so good at leading a war though.
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Aug 31, 2019 01:24
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SlothfulCobra posted:It was a war over representative government. England had pretty strong democratic traditions (for the time) where men with property could get a say in how they were governed, and the colonies themselves had a number of self-governed institutions, so that's what gave them the idea that there was a reason to not just accept things when England levied some extra taxes and tried cracking down on non-mercantilist trade. It might seem like a smaller thing in the grand scheme of things, but that's what mattered to them at the time. No taxation without representation! Offer does not apply to slaves, natives or the unpropertied
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Aug 31, 2019 02:23
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Pragmatically for people who had no chance to participate in governance, it would've been about lowering taxes (since England was levying taxes to pay for the seven years' war on top of local taxes), free trade, and freedom to encroach on indian territory. Although I imagine there might've been a better ratio of landowners to non-landowners in the Americas. At the very least, local government meant you could go up to your local political leader's house to yell at him in person rather than waiting a couple months for your complaints to maybe reach him. I feel like it's not worth it to judge historical people on philosophical stamdards from outside of their era, since barely anyone will ever measure up. Unless you're directly trying to counter nationalistic mythology, in that case it's free game.
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Aug 31, 2019 03:15
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GotLag posted:It was a war to exchange being ruled by British landowners for being ruled by American-based landowners Hey now, it was also about replacing the ruling tier of American-based landowners with the newer group of American-based landowners!
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Aug 31, 2019 03:39
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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The American revolution was a liberal revolution - something we saw alot of in Europe after 1814 up to 1848 aswell. It was about enforcing a constitution, guarantees of rights, and civil liberties, and not about solving any social questions. It's only about 1870 we see revolutions being more about social change than political - American revolution fits right into the liberal mold we see all over europe (Spain,Austria,Italy,France,German states) over the next 50 years.
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Aug 31, 2019 03:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:Pragmatically for people who had no chance to participate in governance, it would've been about lowering taxes (since England was levying taxes to pay for the seven years' war on top of local taxes), free trade, and freedom to encroach on indian territory. It's in part for these reasons that I don't like calling it the revolutionary war. There was no revolution in the sense of "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" like occurred in certain other revolutions. It was simply a war for independence. The American-based elites thought they could do a better job than the higher elites an ocean away. So those elites decided to separate and were able to get locals to fight a little bit.
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Aug 31, 2019 04:10
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I mean regardless of Jefferson's hypocrisy, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," was and to a degree still is a fairly revolutionary statement.
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Aug 31, 2019 04:19
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It would be if he had actually meant it. "Rich white protestant men have a bunch of inalienable rights" had been pretty well established in the ECW.
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Aug 31, 2019 04:39
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I think we're being a bit unfair to some of the more radical actors within the Revolution who were genuinely pushing for more change. It's just that they got shafted in the end. A bit like judging the Jacobins by the actions of Napoleon.
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Aug 31, 2019 04:46
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tbh at this point casual discussion of the american revolution is like casual discussion of panthers or Stalin in that everyone trips over themselves to disagree with the wrong-but-popular narrative that they keep being wrong but in the opposite way e: for example how leftists today will explain the Boston Massacre, in which terrified cops opened fire into a crowd of civilians for the crime of yelling and throwing poo poo at them, as somehow being a justified thing the cops did. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Aug 31, 2019 |
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Aug 31, 2019 04:46
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PittTheElder posted:It would be if he had actually meant it. "Rich white protestant men have a bunch of inalienable rights" had been pretty well established in the ECW. Except the Constitution established freedom of religion, which was extremely radical: quote:Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. This was not a statement that would have flown in literally any other governing body in the world at the time. The framers of the Constitution did not go nearly as far as they should have in establishing a free and democratic society, but they weren't just trying to make "Britain Mark II." There were some real radicals and idealists among them, and they laid the foundations and ideological underpinnings for nearly all the revolitions that were to come.
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Aug 31, 2019 04:53
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twerking on the railroad posted:It's in part for these reasons that I don't like calling it the revolutionary war. There was no revolution in the sense of "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" like occurred in certain other revolutions. It was simply a war for independence. The American-based elites thought they could do a better job than the higher elites an ocean away. So those elites decided to separate and were able to get locals to fight a little bit. Well that's frankly ludicrous, because that's not what revolutionary means. Consider the earlier Glorious Revolution in the UK which quite manifestly was not about that. Pick a new word to describe what you want revolution to mean if you need one, cuz the existing uses are much older.
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Aug 31, 2019 04:54
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Just to remind people that in the first 50 years of America getting its independence (from 1783-1833), you had: 1. An attempted military coup by the army upset that the elected government wasn't addressing their needs (the Newburgh conspiracy). This had followed a mutiny by the army in the capital two years prior that had forced the legislature to flee and decide that they had to create a special federal capital because they couldn't trust state governments to protect them (Philadelphia mutiny) 2. An anti government rebellion in one of the states to protest taxation and individual debt (Shay's Rebellion) 3. The drafting in secret and radification of a new, illegal constitution to replace the existing one (The writing of the Constitution) 4. An antitax rebellion that required the President himself to lead an army to crush it.(The Whiskey Rebellion) 5. The adoption of censorship laws by the government to stifle their political opponents and shut down their newspapers (the Sedition Act) 6. An attempted slave revolt in the capital of one of the biggest states (Gabriel's Rebellion/the Prosser Rebellion) 7. A breakdown of the electoral system where no one knew who was president for three months (The Election of 1800) 8 . An actual slave rebellion that led to 500 slaves under arms (The German Coast Uprising) 9. A war, caused in part by an attempt, in the name of liberty, to take over it's neighbor/liberate it from a colonial power that led to the capital being burned and a secession attempt by part of the country (The War of 1812, the burning of Washington DC, the Hartford Conspiracy) 10. Another presidential succession crisis, where the candidate who won the most electoral votes and the most popular votes lost the election to the son of a former president because of a deal said son of a former president made with the other candidates in the race (The election of 1824) 11. The president unilaterally declaring a treaty invalid and negotiating and ratifying a new treaty, which a state government then refused to recognize almost leading to armed rebellion against the federal government by a state (Repeal of the Treaty of Indian Springs, adoption of the Treaty of Washington) 12. The statement by a state government that they didn't have to abide by federal law (the Nullification Crisis) 13. Another major slave insurrection (Nat Turner's Rebellion) 14. A state declaring they didn't have to abide by a Supreme Court decision (Worcester v Georgia) And that's just some of the highlights. You didn't have murders in the streets or the creation of gulags, but things weren't all wine and roses.
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Aug 31, 2019 04:58
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Epicurius posted:And that's just some of the highlights. You didn't have murders in the streets or the creation of gulags, but things weren't all wine and roses. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Aug 31, 2019 |
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Aug 31, 2019 05:03
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HEY GUNS posted:people say that permanent crisis is an essential characteristic of modernity because of late capitalism or neoliberal globalization or whatever but things were constantly terrible all the time, they just didn't have twitter Yeah that's one of the things that annoys me about people blaming every negative thing about the modern world on capitalism—yes, capitalist systems often facilitate or encourage certain negative behaviors, but these behaviors are just extensions of how shortsighted idiots (i.e. humans) have always operated.
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Aug 31, 2019 05:07
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fishmech posted:Well that's frankly ludicrous, because that's not what revolutionary means. Consider the earlier Glorious Revolution in the UK which quite manifestly was not about that. I know it's more than a little silly of me to hold this view, because of course definitions shift over time but these days people use the word to refer to any little fart of an idea by a silicon valley tech bro so I feel ok being a little unreasonable on this point. Anyway, the etymology meaning to rotate or to revolve or to churn up the social order holds up for the French or Russian or South African revolutions but not so much for 1776.
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Aug 31, 2019 05:26
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people call lots of things revolutions and have for centuries but actually you'll find that if you only look at the revolutions that I think are revolutions and not the other ones, my english is objectively correct.
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Aug 31, 2019 05:30
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Yeah that's one of the things that annoys me about people blaming every negative thing about the modern world on capitalism—yes, capitalist systems often facilitate or encourage certain negative behaviors, but these behaviors are just extensions of how shortsighted idiots (i.e. humans) have always operated. any given year in history would look like absolute hell with real time reporting of literally everything on earth from the supercomputer in everyone's pockets. How do you know if each tremble of the needle is the first step towards catastrophe, something you'll forget about tomorrow, or meaningless noise? you can't HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Aug 31, 2019 |
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Aug 31, 2019 05:44
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:people call lots of things revolutions and have for centuries but actually you'll find that if you only look at the revolutions that I think are revolutions and not the other ones, my english is objectively correct.
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Aug 31, 2019 05:47
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twerking on the railroad posted:It's in part for these reasons that I don't like calling it the revolutionary war. There was no revolution in the sense of "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" like occurred in certain other revolutions. It was simply a war for independence. The American-based elites thought they could do a better job than the higher elites an ocean away. So those elites decided to separate and were able to get locals to fight a little bit. I think there's plenty of truth to this. BUT the US revolution also definitely involved large scale popular mobilization and was popular in all segments of society. Of course it was not always popular with the same segments of society everywhere at once, but still, it was far from just an elite movement. It's kinda funny looking at the overt motivations for the revolution, which heavily emphasized opposition to taxation. So with that as a motivation, it's somewhat surprising that the revolution itself immediately necessitated the US to impose substantial new taxes to pay for its defense, and to continue these after independence, and that the American revolutionaries immediately acquiesced to this expediency. This is a typical result of revolution, where the overt motivation is very often something that the revolution itself cannot possibly achieve, and in fact often directly undermines. Very rare is the revolution that we can say is truly rational.
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Aug 31, 2019 05:56
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zoux posted:I was going to say that violent revolutions rarely stop when the regime is overthrown and they end up eating each other, but is that true on balance? I wouldn't necessarily count wars for independence as revolutions, we didn't exactly hang George III in 1783
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Aug 31, 2019 06:07
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Dumb question, but what colors are chlorine and mustard gas? Also everyone check out yesterday's Behind the Bastards. It's pretty loving good.
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Aug 31, 2019 06:13
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You can acknowledge history without legitimizing techbro jargon. Although I did sure like the Wii.twerking on the railroad posted:It's in part for these reasons that I don't like calling it the revolutionary war. There was no revolution in the sense of "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" like occurred in certain other revolutions. It was simply a war for independence. The American-based elites thought they could do a better job than the higher elites an ocean away. So those elites decided to separate and were able to get locals to fight a little bit. That's a weird road to start going down though, since after you disqualify the American Revolution along those lines, you start having to disqualify a lot of other big nominal revolutions, including most of the French ones, since they similarly dragged their heels on doing a big flip-around of society, despite using flowery language and riding popular support beyond the immediate beneficiaries of the revolution. And after you cut out the big events that originated the term, the relevancy of such a distinction starts to become unimportant. One way or another, the American Revolution was a big event that was part of a long intellectual tradition of events that established modern understandings of democracy and human rights, and there really is a sense of progress from "revolution" to "revolution", as people learn from and iterate on those who came before. I'd even go so far as to include the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule in that tradition, since it really shows where America got its crazy unworkable articles of confederation ideas from.
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Aug 31, 2019 06:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:I'd even go so far as to include the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule in that tradition i would recommend margaret jacob on the low countries and the Radical Enlightenment though
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Aug 31, 2019 06:36
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Blame Larry Gonick, he cursed me with that idea and it will be in my head forevermore.Epicurius posted:And that's just some of the highlights. You didn't have murders in the streets or the creation of gulags, but things weren't all wine and roses. This is a really cool post, especially because I don't know about a number of these. It's neat to see some of the tribulations of the young US laid out like that, especially since so much of the time, people talking about the early US try to just brush over all the early issues in a fervor of nationalistic mythology. It's still impressive how much these dumb idiots who hate each other don't kill each other though. One thing I have a minor issue with: Epicurius posted:3. The drafting in secret and radification of a new, illegal constitution to replace the existing one (The writing of the Constitution) Since it wasn't particularly secret, was exhaustively deliberated to be as legal as possible, and wasn't all that rad either. 
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Aug 31, 2019 06:56
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's still impressive how much these dumb idiots who hate each other don't kill each other though. e: this doesn't mean they won't be incredibly lovely if they can get away with it of course at least in many cases Nessus fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Aug 31, 2019 |
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Aug 31, 2019 07:06
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ninjahedgehog posted:Quoting this not only for the — 'ow you zay — incroyable French accent but also a followup. The idea that a rural Frenchman 75 years ago would know English seems... optimistic.
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Aug 31, 2019 07:49
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I once read an account from a Canadian soldier, relating how he and his fellow soldiers tried and failed to make themselves understood at a Norman village with their high-school French, until the man they were talking to just told them to speak English (he'd been a steward on the liner Normandie).
GotLag fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Aug 31, 2019 |
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Aug 31, 2019 08:10
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GotLag posted:I once read an account from a Canadian soldier, relating how he and his fellow soldiers tried and failed to make themselves understood at a Norman village with their high-school French, until the man they were talking to just told them to speak English (he'd been a steward on the liner Normandie).
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Aug 31, 2019 08:18
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:e: for example how leftists today will explain the Boston Massacre, in which terrified cops opened fire into a crowd of civilians for the crime of yelling and throwing poo poo at them, as somehow being a justified thing the cops did. I thought the surprising thing was that cops fired into a crowd of civilians and then some of them were actually convicted for manslaughter. I guess the victims were white though.
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Aug 31, 2019 08:34
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PittTheElder posted:I thought the surprising thing was that cops fired into a crowd of civilians and then some of them were actually convicted for manslaughter. I guess the victims were white though.  Now that said a Founding Father did get one of the cops off, so perhaps some things don't change.
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Aug 31, 2019 09:03
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Since when did the Boston Massacre have anything to do with police? Modern police hadn't been invented yet. The peace was being kept by the army, about as well as soldiers have ever managed to keep the peace. Or am I missing some fabulously subtle irony at play here?
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Aug 31, 2019 09:31
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Trin Tragula posted:Since when did the Boston Massacre have anything to do with police? Modern police hadn't been invented yet. The peace was being kept by the army, about as well as soldiers have ever managed to keep the peace. Or am I missing some fabulously subtle irony at play here?
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Aug 31, 2019 09:43
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ninjahedgehog posted:If Allied forces making their way through France came in contact with a rural village like this and a local wanted to point out a Nazi position or give them a fresh croissant or whatever, would it be more likely that the local would know English or one of the soldiers would know French? Would an American or British platoon have an interpreter with them? I assume the Canadians would have a certain percentage of Quebecois in their troop so it wouldn't be an issue. They had dictionaries like this https://www.worldwar1luton.com/object/soldiers-english-french-dictionary especially military police would probably have at least some guy present who would understand French better, or they'd find a translator from the locals. Pretty much the same as it is nowadays in eg. Afghanistan. Also you only need to give your soldiers one night's leave in a French city and they'll be fluent speakers, at least as long as the topics involve girls or booze.
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Aug 31, 2019 10:14
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Xiahou Dun posted:Dumb question, but what colors are chlorine and mustard gas? Chlorine gas is yellow, mustard is yellow-brown.
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Aug 31, 2019 10:29
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Chlorine gas is yellow, mustard is yellow-brown. Thank you. You can’t really GIS that if you don’t see colors.
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Aug 31, 2019 11:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:Since it wasn't particularly secret, was exhaustively deliberated to be as legal as possible, and wasn't all that rad either. Maybe a little bit of a an exaggeration, but the Constitution was debated in secret, though. One of the first decisions made by the Convention was to bar the public and to ban delegates from speaking about or writing about the debates. And the whole convention was arguably illegal. Congress had commissioned the convention to meet and consider amending the Articles of Confederation, and they extended that mandate to rewrite them entirely. quote:Resolved that in the opinion of Congress it is expedient that on the second Monday in May next a Convention of delegates who shall have been appointed by the several states be held at Philadelphia for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein as shall when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the states render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government & the preservation of the Union. One of the states, Rhode Island, didn't send any delegates at all. Meanwhile, the Articles said about amendment: quote:And the Articles of this confederation shall be inviolably observed by every state, and the union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them, unless such alteration be agreed to in a congress of the united states, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every state. But the Constitution took effect on June 21, 1788, when the 9th state, New Hampshire, ratified it. Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island hadn't ratified it yet, and wouldn't do so until 1790 (and every attempt they made to ratify before then had failed utterly. In fact, a pro-ratification 4th of July celebration in 1788 in Providence was disrupted by an antifederalist judge who led a mob of a thousand men to break it up.) This being the case, then, the US Constitutution had been in effect illegally for two years.
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Aug 31, 2019 16:09
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Saving this for later use, the last sequence seems applicable for many milhist instances! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJJHL5p9UIE&t=441s
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Aug 31, 2019 17:38
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