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Sometimes I see obviously wrong stuff on Wikipedia and wonder if it's a professor laying out a honeypot for lazy undergrads.
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Jan 7, 2016 22:30
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Was it legally possible for a woman to be Holy Roman Empress? Asking for a friend. (The friend is Angela Merkel.)
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Jan 8, 2016 01:30
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JcDent posted:...why? You need to have the output of the widget you're replacing remain completely identical in all aspects, otherwise you need to rework everything else in the system it interacts with and retest and recertify everything and it gets to be a much bigger and more complicated project.
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Jan 8, 2016 16:04
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:All of them. Even Napoleon III?!
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Jan 9, 2016 23:43
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I don't know if I ever actually carried anything in my cargo pant pockets. Maybe some pogs?
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Jan 12, 2016 00:43
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Could WWI subs launch torpedoes from periscope depth, or did they need to surface?
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Jan 12, 2016 17:58
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Taiping Tianguo Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 Part 23 Part 24 Part 25 The Panthay Rebellion, Part 1  The Farthest Province Yunnan (雲南), the land beyond the southern clouds, was the result of successive waves of imperial expansion during the heyday of the Qing. While they succeeded in displacing the various Tai kingdoms and pushing up to the borders of Burma and Tibet, the people of the province remained stubbornly non-Chinese. An enormously complex smorgasbord of languages and ethnicities populated the province, and aboriginal tribes were subordinate to the government but only weakly incorporated into Chinese civilization. Yunnan's regional identity was relatively strong. Even the early Han settlers, after a few generations, developed a parochial, locally centered outlook. As the saying went, "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away."  Part of this distinct identity was due to geography. Separated by mountains, and adjacent to Burma and Vietnam, Yunnan was linked by trade to the outside world in a way few provinces were. The eastern side of the province was dominated by Kunming(昆明), the capital and the center of trade between Sichuan and Vietnam. The west, meanwhile, was economically focused around Dali (大理), and traded between Tibet and Burma. The patterns of trade ran north- south to foreign lands, not east-west to classical China. The actual trade was largely carried out by non-Han groups, most importantly the Hui (回). The Hui traveled widely from Yunnan to Southeast Asia, where they were recognized widely as traders and merchants, a people apart in everywhere they went. It is actually from Burma, not China, that the term "Panthay" was applied to them. They were successful traders who relied on their transnational family and community ties to facilitate their business. This heavy contact with foreign nations and close ties with ethnic compatriots abroad set the Hui of Yunnan apart from the typical Chinese. So did the fact that they were Muslim. Islam had first come to China with traders not long after Muhammad, but by and large they remained foreigners, restricted to cities and cut off from mainstream life. The ancestors of what would become the Hui came with the Mongol conquest, where Muslims from Central Asia were employed as administrators and enforcers by the multiethnic Yuan empire. By the time of the Ming, these former dominators had simply become another part of China. Some maintained their original Turkic languages and culture. Many others adopted Chinese language and customs, intermarried with Chinese, accepted Chinese converts, and became sinicized- but not enough. They were not foreign, but still Muslim, still not truly Chinese. "Hui" is sometimes used interchangeably with"Chinese Muslim", but it is a bit tricky to unpack the religious identity from an ethnic one. Generally speaking, it refers to a Chinese-speaking Muslim, but is treated as an ethnic minzu by modern day China. An Uighur isn't Hui, though they are "Chinese" and "Muslim". If Wang Peng of Beijing converts to Islam tomorrow, his ID card will still say "Han". Meanwhile, Ma Lin of Kunming will still be a "Hui" even if she has never said the Shahada in her life. If your Han ancestors converted 300 years ago, you count as Hui today, if they did it 50 years ago you are Han. Ethnic identity and the way it is classified has changed continually and it can be misleading to try to interpret it in modern terms.  Typical Hui girl In any case, the Hui were recognized as being set apart from the mainstream of Chinese life by their faith, and also had some sense of themselves as a different people independent of their religion. In large cities they would live side by side with their Han neighbors, but in rural areas they often lived in separate villages. Rural Hui commonly organized into large labor gangs to work in the mines or elsewhere. They did this very efficiently, creating resentment among the Chinese they outcompeted. They also would, on religious grounds, decline to participate in festivals or contribute to the maintenance of shrines, sometimes creating friction with the Han Chinese. And they didn't eat pork, so there was clearly something wrong with them. Suspicion of the Hui was not helped by a warlike reputation, dating back to their origins as Mongol enforcers and reinforced by religious strife in China's northwest (which I will cover when I do Gansu and Shaanxi, but was not relevant to Yunnan except that it contributed to Han Chinese fear of the Hui). The Hui constituted only about 10% of Yunnan's 10 million people, but they had a disproportionate influence beyond their numbers. The rest of the province was divided between Han Chinese and other minority groups, which the Chinese referred to collectively as "yi"(夷). They included Lolo (羅羅), Zhuang (壯), Bouyei (擺夷), Lisu (栗僳) and Miao(苗), all with their own languages and customs. The Hui were not yi, but they weren't Chinese either. They still got the dog radical, even if by appearance, language, and lifestyle they could often easily pass for Chinese. The circumstances of the yi can be analogized to that of the minorities in Guizhou. They existed somewhat apart from mainstream Chinese civilization, governed by local leaders, but increasingly coming into conflict with Han Chinese settlers and other minority groups over claims to ancestral land. Where they did break out in open revolt, the authorities usually placed them blame on either the treachery of Han instigators, or the foolishness of corrupt Han officials. In neither case was a great deal of agency assigned to the rebellious peoples themselves. Before getting into the circumstances producing the Panthay rebellion, I should first clarify that though Muslim-led, it was decidedly not a holy war. There was no declaration of Jihad, no fatwa calling the Hui to defend the faith against the infidel. Conversely, their enemies in the empire were not interested in converting a dangerous sect, but rather in suppressing a warlike people. To the limited extent that Hui ethnic and cultural identity is separable from religious identity, it was on the basis of ethnic identity as a people apart that war would come. (This is a matter of some debate, of course.) Paths of Blood In the half century preceding the rebellion, numerous incidents of violence between Han and Hui occurred, often originating in mining towns. Yunnan's copper mines were important to the empire, but by the 19th century most were mined out, and competition for work in the remaining mines was fierce. The court would often cast these incidents as cases of local feuds gone out of control, but there were troubling details that didn't necessarily fit this simple narrative. For one, the dead were overwhelmingly Hui. Furthermore, while the incidents may have started with the young men of the mining community, when violence came the elderly, women, and children of Hui communities were among the dead. Nevertheless, the idea persisted that the warlike Hui needed to be controlled. The worst violent incident occurred at Baoshan (保山). Inter-community violence escalated, stirred up by Han societies on one hand and a band of Hui migrants/bandits from the countryside. The local Hui cooperated with the government and had the rowdy Hui elements expelled from the area, but when some of the bandits attacked nearby towns things got ugly. The Han societies were convinced of the existence of a fifth column. They marched into the city, and proceeded to slaughter the Hui. Men, women, and children were massacred alike, leaving 8,000 dead. The incident was initially covered up- local officials presented themselves as having nipped an incipient rebellion in the bud. As the truth came out, they shifted to suggesting that they had lost control of the people, who had failed to properly distinguish between good Hui and bad Hui. The assumption remained that bad Hui was a real and serious problem. The question of whether the massacre might actually be representative of a bad Han problem was not addressed. There was some violent protest and planned rebllion in outlying Hui communities following Baoshan, but Hui community leaders cooperated with the Qing in stifling these, still trusting in the court to eventually make things right. The arrival of Lin Zexu (林則徐) (of opium war fame) as governor general offered some hope. He generally let the government officials complicit in the massacre off the hook, but investigated the incident and arrested several of the massacre leaders from the Han societies. This was immediately responded to by a second massacre of the Hui. Lin sent 10,000 men to the town, at which point several hundred perpetrators were handed over without a fight. Afterwards, Lin decided that Han and Hui must be separated if peace was to prevail. The Hui were relocated one hundred miles away, to a "fertile valley" that in actuality was malarial swamp. Peace had been restored, but at the cost of convincing many Yunnanese Hui that they could no longer trust the government to defend them. The early 1850's saw additional incidents, but nothing that convinced the government to change course and proactively deal with increasing anti-Hui hostility. Rather, the pattern would repeat of a government whose official policy of non-discrimination meshed uncomfortably in practice with a worldview that still saw the Hui (and only the Hui) as a potential threat to provincial order. The decade began with gentry-led militias in the Talang mining region massacring and driving the Hui from the region following an initial dispute over a gambling debt. It was met with a shockingly tepid response from the government even as the militias looted and robbed indiscriminately. Lin Zexu had left the province a year earlier, and soon all of the empire's resources and top talent would be directed to face the Taiping, leaving Yunnan verging on anarchy. Perhaps the officials of the time felt that anarchic chaos dominated by violent Han was preferable to violent Hui, but most likely they were simply ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the rapidly deteriorating situation. In 1854, the same gangs that had rampaged through Talang moved on and attacked the Shiyang mine. The militia that was supposed to defend the mine instead joined forces with the newcomers to massacre the Hui miners. Ma Rulong (馬如龍)(remember this guy) organized the Hui in self defense. Realizing that they could not defend the mines, they instead blocked the entrances and retreated. Their chance to seize control of the mine's wealth lost, the militia contented themselves with a series of attacks on Hui villages. If economic rivalry among miners lay at the roots of Han-Hui hostility, that origin had long been forgotten. The militia's goal was ethnic cleansing,"洗回" ,plain and simple. Over two years, at least dozen villages were destroyed and several cities struck, with the mosques destroyed and any Hui found massacred. At least 8,000 were killed. In 1856, the genocidal rampage had moved to the area of the provincial capital of Kunming. It was now time for the Qing officials to decide what to do about it. Governor-general Hengchun (恆春) was absent, having been called to Guizhou to help deal with the Miao rebellion. In his absence, military control devolved to Shuxinga(舒興阿), the governor. He had previously been stationed in the northwest, where he had developed a lasting hatred of Muslims. Shuxinga was in extremely poor health mentally and physically, so Qingsheng (清盛), a provincial judge who seems to have shared Shuxinga's views on Muslims, took an increasingly large role in day to day government. He would work closely with the local Han gentry to come up with a plan.  Map of Some Massacres To these men, the news of fighting presented an excellent opportunity to put an end to the Han-Hui violence. More specifically, by putting an end to the Hui. Using the news of violence near the capital as an excuse, a secret letter is circulated through the city and outlying area, notifying officials and prominent Han leaders that the Hui are to be suppressed. Gesha wulun (格殺勿論) goes the order, no consequences for legal killing. In modern Google translation, "shoot to kill." The order is put into practice and 8,000 Hui are murdered in Kunming alone until Qingsheng's mother begs him to put a stop to it. The Kunming massacre will mark the start of the Panthay rebellion. The Righteous Anger of the Hui People As word gets out that killing Hui is now officially approved, violence spreads throughout the province, and thousands are murdered. But as the ethnic cleansing attempt goes province wide, so becomes the Hui response to it. News of the Kunming massacre spreads rapidly as the Hui warn their communities, and before long they have organized province wide in self defense. Soon, militias are ready, and soon after that militias become armies. The Hui people mobilize en masse in self defense, and the whole of Yunnan will soon be embroiled in conflict. For the recently returned governor-general Hengchun, this all seemed like a terrible mistake. He did not initially attempt to stop the Hui militarily, hoping that restraint on his part would allow the situation to calm naturally. The belief that most Hui were not interested in rebellion and would only fight if provoked was correct. His miscalculation was not realizing that circumstances had long ago passed that point of no return. He had no control over the Han militias and gentry-led organizations that had provoked the fighting and were continuing to attack the Hui, so his non-confrontational approach was futile. Meanwhile the imperial court, in accordance with long standing prejudice, assumed the Hui, at least the "bad" ones, were at the root of the problem and demanded their suppression. Eventually Hengchun gave in and committed imperial troops to the fight against the Hui. The Hui had, too many times in the past, trusted the government to protect them and been betrayed. This time, as the massacre at Kunming fell into the same pattern as Baoshan and so many previous incidents, they refused to let themselves be butchered illegally and then be victimized legally by a supposedly impartial government. As always, violence between the Han and Hui had been met with a response that was from the government's perspective fair and balanced, as the troops were instructed to only kill rebellious Hui. The fact that military action against the exterminationist Han militias was never even considered demonstrates that the failures of Qing ethnic policy ran much deeper than any one official. Hui resistance would rise up throughout the province in geographically separate movements. Perhaps the most successful was in the far west, near the major city of Dali. The city lay in a large valley with fortification at either end, meaning it should be relatively secure from attack. Many of the forces supposed to be defending the city, however, had been sent away on a successful campaign to put down a Hui uprising in Yaozhou. As news of the fighting elsewhere reached Dali, Han militias were again organizing to attack the Hui. But in Dali the Hui refused to wait for a government response and struck first. They were able to seize both the north and south pass fortifications. Assisted by a contingent of Hui from outside the valley, they then fought to take control of the city of Dali, having overcome the Hui's numerical disadvantage by concentration of force. The Han defenders divided in two, seeking to break out and seize either of the passes. Both forces were destroyed, leaving the Hui in command of an economically and strategically important city which could be the nucleus of future resistance. The capture of Dali also gave them a leader. The victorious Hui select Du Wenxiu (杜文秀 ) to be generalissimo and leader of the Yunnan Hui. He calls for a new system in which Hui, Han, and Yi unite together in harmonious cooperation. It is the beginning of a multi-ethnic, independent Yunnanese government that will last for over sixteen years.  A plan comes together Meanwhile, in the south, Ma Rulong, leader of Hui resistance during the 1854 massacres was organizing a force composed of equal parts Hui and yi, responding to the massacre of Hui in the southern city of Lin'an (臨安). For reasons that aren't clear, the ethnic cleansers had apparently assumed that the yi would be on their side, since the Hui were the only minority who were currently marked for genocide. The yi were in fact no more well-disposed towards the government then their counterparts in Guizhou. Instead of standing aside, the many ethnicities of Yunnan recognized increased Han settlement and Chinese government as a much more dangerous threat to their traditional lands and way of life than the Hui, and would rise up as well once the Hui proved the viability of resistance. "They came for the Hui, and I Ma Rulong was one of many Hui leaders who emerged to lead the decentralized resistance. The Hui of Yunnan looked to Ma Dexin (馬德信), a prominent and educated cleric who had been to Mecca, for leadership, but his role was as spokesperson and spiritual leader, not a warrior. He delegated military matters to a man named Xu Yuanji (徐元吉). Ma Rulong, while, unable to claim Lin'an for the rebels, was able to carve out an area of relative safety between Lin'an and Kunming. He makes a momentous decision and convinces Ma Dexin to lend his forces in support. In June of 1857, Ma Rulong leads a massive multi-ethnic force to the capital of Kunming, which sits alone on a vast plain.  Hengchun closed the gates of the city, exposing thousands trapped outside the walls to the rebel's wrath. The government troops had been dispersed throughout the province, fighting widespread rebellions and the new rival government in Dali, and were completely surprised and unequipped to deal with the tens of thousands of rebels that had appeared in front of the capital. Hope of relief from other provinces was futile, as any substantial forces that existed would have been sent east to fight the Taiping, not west to distant and unimportant Yunnan. After a failed attempt to sortie out of the city, Hengchun was out of options. In July of 1857, governor-general Hengchun does the only thing he can. He kills himself.
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Jan 13, 2016 05:03
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Nebakenezzer posted:E: I'm glad mr. P-mack you're still rolling on these posts. In addition to all the other goodness, I'm learning a shitload about Chinese ethnographty that I was in ignorance of. Is China sorta like India in that it has a lots of ethnic groups that kinda get glossed over when talking about China? I've been learning this ethnography stuff as I go, and its complicated and I'm terrified some expert is going to descend on the thread and yell at me for getting something wrong. China today is 94% Han Chinese, and minorities are concentrated in the west (Yunnan is still 50% minority) so theres plenty of places that are basically homogenous, nothing like the madness that is India. The problem is that ethnicity is forced into the 56 minzu paradigm. This creates a very essentialist conception of identity that downplays the fluidity of ethnic identity as a social construct. Then they try to apply the same categories back in history on to people that didn't think in those terms. The Qing idea that people should and will eventually become Chinese is replaced with the idea that you are, have always been, always will be Hui or Miao or whatever, but that that identity is a subset of the common Chinese 5000 year history. It's also not great because some of these 55 minorities are subgroups of a common people, others contain completely unintelligible languages grouped together, but you will never ever convince the CCP to deviate from 55 as the number. Then we get to the Han, which is a uniform ethnic group with a common history despite half a dozen different languages, err, umm, dialects. Go back to the Qing, and the Hakka get the dog radical. Today they're part of that Han 94%. The CCP manage to assemble a way of understanding ethnicity where the Muslim rebels of the 19th century are heroes, but merely talking about greater autonomy for Xinjiang will get you arrested. Once I get to the end of the narrative I'll dig more into the historiography of the anti-Qing rebellions.
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Jan 13, 2016 18:21
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Koramei posted:You glance on this but it's pretty important isn't it? I don't wanna say this authoritatively 'cause I'm not totally clear on it, but I'd been under the impression that the idea of "Han" as any kind of uniform ethnic group wasn't really an actual thing until the Cultural Revolution threw everything into chaos and people started moving across the country in large numbers. + incentivized settling in the western provinces and rural flight over the past couple of decades etc since then. Even today though a Han from Shanxi and a Han from Zhejiang are so dissimilar that the only reason we think of them as alike is because it's convenient for the CCP this way and nobody in the west can be bothered to learn it differently. That's the problem, yeah. Imagined communities and all that. There was a broad concept of distinctive Chineseness before the modern era but it was more closely tied to "civilized" dress and customs than genetics. The Manchu had obvious reasons to not fully exclude themselves from the umbrella of Chinese identity. You could change your Miao name and become Chinese if you really wanted to. The Hui stopped the assimilation process halfway, which may have been what marked them as a target. But if you yell "One China 56 Minzu 5000 Years" for 60 years the modern day territory starts conforming to the map. The past doesn't, and we don't really have a fully developed common vocabulary to describe ethnicity that matches up with how people of the time understood it. The books I've been reading spend the first 20 pages trying to ad hoc create that framework before getting into the actual history. I think we talked about Karl May and Germany a while back. This book I'm reading about the Hui has a quote from a 20th century Chinese settler describing moving to Gansu as being a Wild West cowboy in Indian country. I wonder now how "Han" as an identity becomes something different in a frontier context, kind of how "white" did once there was an Other to define it against.
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Jan 13, 2016 19:48
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SlothfulCobra posted:So what you're saying is, they would've done better if they fought naked. There was a military doctor who showed up for a duel and promptly took all his clothes off. His opponent asked him what the hell, at which point the doctor talked for a while about all the gnarly infections he'd seen. At that point the other guy decided he didn't actually want to duel anymore.
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Jan 14, 2016 16:02
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Trin Tragula posted:Do the Amish not count as being part of the Pennsylvania Dutch? That was the joke I was hoping to arrive at...(slowly, on a horse and cart) I once got to listen to a conversation where an old guy was asking a Dutch girl if they had Amish in the Netherlands, except her English wasn't perfect and she thought he was saying "army" and then they both got more and more confused as it went on.
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Jan 14, 2016 18:53
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The Poles were in the old Battle of Britain movie, so I assume the average old person knows about them.
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Jan 15, 2016 17:07
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Delaying the invasion of Russia to bail out Italy in the Balkans was crucial. Glorious Serbia should get most of the credit for Nazi defeat.
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Jan 15, 2016 18:12
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JcDent posted:Like Hungarians, the Finns come from Finno-Ugric stock, which is why their languages are gibberish. I assume the F-Us came from rhe general direction of Asia. Under US law, they're white. There was a lawsuit about it in 1908, as people were trying to keep the filthy Finns out but the only immigration laws on the books were the ones banning Asians. http://www.historymuseumeot.com/mfahs/htm/part8_0026.htm
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Jan 16, 2016 14:19
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Libluini posted:Some people have started arguing the 30-Years-War has come back, this time for Islam and this time somewhat farther to the East and South of Germany. Could have sworn I read a thing comparing the 30YW to the Congolese wars and the way they kept drawing in neighboring nations. Like I said before, if I was a total shithead I'd be writing an article about how we need a new Ever Victorious Army to put ISIS in their place.
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Jan 17, 2016 13:26
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The Puckle gun was designed to be capable of firing either round or square bullets, the latter was recommended to only be used against non-Christian opponents.
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Jan 18, 2016 01:26
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Hopefully have another update up this week, but please no one hold me to that. I'm still toying with the idea of eventually turning this Taiping stuff into a *boo* popular history book with a *hiss* broad thesis. Since I'm of necessity taking a broad overview I'd like to try to both intertwine the narratives of the various rebellions a bit more in the book format, and also spend a little more time analyzing how and why local violence did or didn't transform into rebellion in various places, and what commonalities were present in that transformation to rebellion. Maybe also consider what ideological links cut across seemingly very dissimilar groups. Since this is turning into the story of both the Taiping and all the other contemporary rebellions, I'd like a title that reflects that. I was thinking of going with "The Longhair's War". Rejecting the queue was one thing that Yunnan Muslims, Guizhou tribesmen, Anhui bandits, Shanghai gangsters, and Guangxi Christians all had in common. Downside is people see the title and assume it's about hippies.
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Jan 26, 2016 02:50
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Fangz posted:While I would love such a book, I kinda suspect something like it might be a tough sell in the West though. Nebakenezzer posted:That sounds good...though your original series of posts had a nice flavor, too. Because you were writing for a pretty specific audience, you managed to keep a good mix between entertaining and informative, while keeping up the pace. Going forward, you might consider writing "for us" Yeah, I'll try to keep things nice and goony as far as forum posts go. If I come across any cuck anecdotes you better believe I'm posting them.
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Jan 26, 2016 03:59
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SeanBeansShako posted:According to Total War's art guys, there was only two types of uniform for the western european soldiers of the 18th century. Medieval II Total War shipped with bugs such as cavalry never charging, two handed weapons never doing damage, pikemen never using pikes, arqebusiers getting stuck in loading animation forever, archers shooting themselves, and shields providing negative protection. The peasant was the most cost effective unit in the game because it was the only one not bugged in some way.
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Jan 31, 2016 17:23
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Fangz posted:What I don't understand is the whole reversed bullet thing. What was that supposed to achieve? Your targets will think the bullets are moving away from them and won't take evasive action until it's too late.
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Feb 2, 2016 23:04
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What about tidal estuaries, huh? Where's your god now?
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Feb 5, 2016 02:41
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Cracked of all places had a pretty good interview with a Viet Cong vet a while back.
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Feb 9, 2016 17:48
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Libluini posted:To be fair, the Opium Wars convinced China to buy more artillery from China didn't really need the Opium wars to convince them to buy every cannon they could, since they also had the whole biggest civil war in human history thing going on. In any case, the whole scramble for concessions and influence thing doesn't really kick into high gear until later. Zuo Zongtang did end up getting some state of the art Krupp cannons that arrived too late to use against the Taiping, but got put to use putting down the northwestern Muslim rebels, who were lucky if they had any guns at all.
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Feb 19, 2016 14:06
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HEY GAL posted:not if you're a woman; Spartan women had it pretty good, comparitively "Why are you Spartan women the only ones who can rule men?" "Because we are also the only ones who give birth to men."
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Feb 27, 2016 03:52
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Trin Tragula posted:...ordering a rifle team to fix bayonets, at which point they all hold the rifle at the muzzle end and start swinging them as clubs. I remember hearing somewhere that this was a not uncommon thing for ACW soldiers to do.
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Feb 27, 2016 13:46
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Delivery McGee posted:I'd think it was superseded by marksmanship around the time metallic cartridges became a thing (so it takes 2 seconds instead of 15 to reload) and completely irrelevant (outside of extreme cases as has been mentioned; modern militaries still teach hand-to-hand combat, just in case) around the time every man was issued a bolt-action rifle and could fire as fast as he could shove 5-round clips into it. Working with some of the info from the internet site here and my limited knowledge of Asian moon runes... First two characters look like a somewhat stylized/messy 雲州, which would be an abbreviation for the province Izumo. Is there a faint vertical line below the left most mark on the third kanji? If so it looks like 住, meaning "dwelling in", with the left vertical stroke lost to the hole. So that at least narrows it down a bit. The 4th looks like 大 with the top cut off by the hole. Th 5th character is illegible, but based on size I'm thinking it's only the left side of the character and the rest has faded. Now here's the question- is it possible that there was a 6th character below it which has faded completely? (hard to tell from a picture how bad the rust is) If so, it may be 大明京, Daiminkin, or a descendent of his, based on searching this database for smiths from Izumo and with 大 in their names.
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Feb 29, 2016 05:54
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HEY GAL posted:lol no ...actually, it was really about secularized bishopric's rights...
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Mar 7, 2016 21:04
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I like the Qing method. Don't just get peasants to carry your poo poo for you, but tear the doors off their houses, sit on it as an improvised sedan chair, and make the poor bastards carry you as well.
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Mar 8, 2016 18:35
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Steel quality aside, mail is supposed to be worn with some kind of padding underneath, not just a coif by itself like Scott Steiner.
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Mar 9, 2016 18:04
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PittTheElder posted:Their usefulness would all depend on the cost ratio to a full Carrier. If 3 CVLs cost as much as one CV, and collectively carry the same aerial compliment, you might actually be far better off building the CVLs, because it makes you less loss-sensitive. But I have no idea what the resource breakdown would actually look like. True, but the basic idea is still applicable. If you have to maintain a CAP the already very limited sorties you can run off a marine baby carrier become even more limited.
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Mar 10, 2016 00:59
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McGee, off topic but I effortposted on your katana's signature a while back. Was it even vaguely helpful?
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Mar 10, 2016 02:51
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Tias posted:It used not to be uncommon for visitors to remote communities like the inuit to be asked to bang a tribe member, in order to keep genes fresh, or so I was told by an anthropologist. I remember a forums story of some retard who was approached with precisely this offer by a gypsy family. He banged the girl, only to then discover that she was fifteen. They extorted him for a poo poo ton of money not to be outed as a paedo.
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Mar 14, 2016 16:10
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BurningStone posted:
Samaritans? They've started allowing women from outside to marry in to the community, provided they convert (not that many takers). And yeah, everyone gets genetically tested before marriage.
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Mar 14, 2016 18:08
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howe_sam posted:Yes, but who the gently caress cares who is and is not Napoleon's rightful heir these days is more my point. Imagine four French governments at the edge of a cliff...
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Mar 15, 2016 03:46
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HEY GAL posted:well you have to kill all but one of them, is it better to let them live in comfort until they're killed as painlessly as possible, or to have a tiny civil war every time your sultan dies? What's the record for tiniest civil war?
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Mar 15, 2016 19:34
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Hazzard posted:Weren't the abolitionists a really small fraction of the population at the start? The anti-slavery party won a national election.
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Mar 19, 2016 22:40
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:This is really oversimplifying it. In fact, the abolitionists actually didn't like Lincoln very much because he was on the record saying he wasn't going to interfere with slavery as President. Then the South seceded anyway, and abolition became more and more popular as the war went on because it became fundamentally clear that there was no way to ensure a lasting victory if slavery as an institution was resumed. Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery because he knew the South would revolt if anyone tried. He and plenty of other northerners would have gladly dispensed with the institution if it were feasible without war. Do we call them abolitionists, or save the term only for people demanding full emancipation now at any cost? The South certainly considered Lincoln an abolitionist by their standards. I agree it's oversimplifying, and so is saying people in the north didn't care much about slavery before the war. Both society and individuals had a lot more nuance to their positions that, as you correctly illustrate, change in reaction to the course of events.
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Mar 19, 2016 22:58
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Libluini posted:Still, Kara Mustafa bringing out the holy standard just so angry Poles could ride it down must be one of the worst gently caress-ups in Muslim history. Reminds me of deciding to bring the True Cross along for Hattin.
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Mar 22, 2016 16:46
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Qing Chinese upper leadership would speak Mandarin (how the dialect got its name). This was also commonly spoken by the hereditary banner armies, even the Manchu soldiers started using it instead of Manchu. The less formal militia units would speak whatever local dialect, which wasn't a problem for yongying forces since the units were all recruited together from the same geographic area. As for how the Taiping managed I dunno, since they had Hakka, Hunanese, and a bunch of other southern dialects already when they rolled into Nanjing. I'll read through Yang Xiuqing's paper on military affairs and see if he says anything. There was always written Chinese, which was a common language separate from any particular spoken dialect. The Taiping would try to reform/simplify it, so modern written Chinese would probably look different if they had won since it would be based on southern dialects instead of Mandarin.
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Mar 22, 2016 17:59
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steinrokkan posted:The moon (or at least that's what they want us to think) There was in the 1950's a proposal to nuke the moon. The idea was that the Russians would be able to see the explosion via telescope and be appropriately scared for two reasons- A: America has the technological ability required to nuke the moon B: America has the batshit insanity required nuke the moon
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Apr 11, 2016 16:03
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