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Samovar posted:I remember hearing (hearing, mind you, so it could be wrong) that the only European country that never had anti-Jewish laws on the books was Scotland. This might be true but only as a technicality, since the United Kingdom (including Scotland) certainly had anti-Jewish laws on the books.
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Nov 4, 2015 18:04
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Obdicut posted:I've seen this guy referenced all the time, and it never explains how. I wish there was an illustration of him holding a gun so we could see how the gently caress he pulled it off. Or some description at all of how he could do poo poo. Did you not see the poster with all the sweet action shots
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Jan 8, 2016 16:58
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The word "barbarian" is technically onomatopeia: it was what the Greeks thought those dumb foreign peoples sounded like, walking around making dumb "bar bar bar" noises in their unintelligible bushit languages.
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Jan 11, 2016 19:27
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RagnarokAngel posted:I think also in the time when we were still mapping out the world it was a lot easier to imagine that there were tons of extinct animals SOMEWHERE over the horizon we just had to find them. It helps that the idea of species and subspecies was not terribly well understood. When lions and elephants disappeared from the fringe of Europe it didn't really register that anything much has been lost, because they knew that elephants and lions were still out there somewhere and if they're maybe not quite exactly the same who cares? If it looks like a lion and quacks like a lion, it's a lion.
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Jan 16, 2016 17:39
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A White Guy posted:Saint James the Moor-Slayer, one of the great heros of the Reconquista, who arrived at the very last possible moment to save countless Christian lives from the vile Moors! A hero, a strong identifier of Spanish nationalism, and also the patron namesake of more than a few cities in the Americas (like Matamoros, literally, Moor Killer). There's also El Cid, hero of Spain's great chivalric epic The Lay of the Cid, a poem extolling the loyalty and virtue of El Cid as a great Christian hero. Even when he is unjustly treated by his king, El Cid's faith and trust in his liege never wavers. When El Cid is exiled on false charges, he still continues to fight on behalf of his liege against the Moors, eventually regaining his honor and titles through his stalwart defense of Christiandom. He sets the perfect example of an honorable Christian warrior, loyal to king and God unto death. The good news is that El Cid is definitely an actual historical figure who did indeed fight in the Reconquista... on the Muslim side. Whoops! After being told to gently caress off by his Christian lord, the historical El Cid turned around and hired himself out as a mercenary to the Muslims, who much admired him for his many successes against the Christians. Even the honorific title the Spanish gave him is adapted from the one the Moors gave him: al Sayyid. El Cid isn't the only chivalric hero who got a good dose of whitewashing. Over the border in France, the big epic chivalric poem is the Song of Roland, who soloed thousands of Muslims in a desperate rearguard action to protect Charlemagne's army as it retreated through the Pyrenees. At least Roland was fighting on the right side; however, there weren't any Muslims in the Pyrenees at the time. Charlemagne got bushwacked by Basques, who were really touchy about their territory and despite their Christianity weren't very happy about giant Frankish armies tromping around on their turf.
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Feb 3, 2016 07:50
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System Metternich posted:I wasn't aware that occultists were patenting their ideas and theories The fact that Wicca can trace its inspirations to so many disparate sources makes it in many ways less authentic, not more. It cannot simultaneously be a syncretic system and an ancient historical tradition. Moreover, Gardner himself acknowledged that a lot of the traditions of "witchcraft" were lost and many of the practices he was teaching were indeed made up as a good-faith approximation. The sad fact is that a lot of Celtic culture went extinct by the early modern era and a lot of what we think of as Celtic culture was invented around the 19th century in an attempt to fill in the blanks.
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Mar 1, 2016 17:02
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" is both smug and dumb
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Apeshit Sixfingers posted:I'd love to know more about this. By the 17th century or so, the English were well on their way towards assimilating the native Celtic cultures of the British Isles. Between physical dominion of the Isles (somewhat unofficial in Scotland's case) and increasing economic hegemony from the nascent industrialization of England, enough English goods and culture were being exported that local traditions were being overwhelmed. Anglicization offered increased material wealth and generally met little resistance, so by the time Scotland and England formally united the Scots were well on their way to becoming English people with funny accents. The only holdouts were a few backwater highland clans that even other Scots looked down on for their backwardness. This process probably would have continued until native Scottish culture died out entirely, except that things turned political. The highland clans were (unsurprisingly) huge supporters of the royal Scottish House of Stuart, which became a thorn in the monarchy's side when the crown passed over to the House of Hanover. After several uprisings centered in the highlands, Parliament decided that the clans' Scottishness was to blame and passed a series of acts banning kilts and other aspects of highland culture in an attempt to suppress them. This was just too much for a lot of Anglicized Scots, since it completely destroyed the polite fiction that the Union (still less than half a century old) was an equal partnership. The fact that most Scots thought that the kilt-wearing highlanders were a bunch of idiot rednecks and a millstone around their country's neck was beside the point--they were their idiot rednecks and England had no right to gently caress with them. Swept up in the tide of feelings that would later coalesce into the Romantic movement, a lot of intellectuals began quietly wearing kilts, founding Scottish societies, and promoting the Scots language. By the time that the Acts of Proscription were repealed 40 years later, there were a lot of Scots eager to practice their heritage. Unfortunately their heritage had been illegal for a couple generations and had mostly been forgotten even before then--and even though traditional Scots were no longer legally second class citizens, they were still second class economically and pro-English landowners continued to oppress them pretty heavily. So there was a certain amount of guesswork involved in the Scottish revival. Pick a traditional Scottish folk song: chances are the version of it you know was written by Robert Burns around 225 years ago, maybe as an adaptation of an earlier song, but often an original composition. The Highland Games? Well, the Scottish clans definitely had athletic competitions, which periodically included some of the modern heavy games, but the canonical Highland Games were created in the 19th century. The Celtic harp? The construction and playing of the original were dead arts; Gaelic revivalists created a new design based on the ancient one. Even the kilts that patriotic Scots wore to thumb their noses at England were developed into their modern form in the 1720s--by an Englishman, no less. (Scottish bagpipes and pipe music have a pretty unequivocally authentic and unbroken tradition, though, mostly because it was kept alive in British army regiments.) I don't have time to get into it right now, but Irish culture follows a very broadly similar pattern--though the assimilation was much less amicable and the suppression was much harsher. the holy poopacy has a new favorite as of 17:38 on Mar 2, 2016 |
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Mar 2, 2016 17:35
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Admiral Bosch posted:Bringing concrete chat back for just a second... From Wikipedia: As badass as this sounds, it doesn't specify human blood and Rome probably had plenty of slaughterhouses.
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Mar 29, 2016 15:41
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nocal posted:There was a recent article about Native American stories of, essentially, a tsunami. These types of stories were presumed false for decades -- just myths. But it turns out that there is evidence that this actually happened, and may happen again, in the Pacific Northwest. There are oral traditions that preserve in the memory of the volcanic eruption that created Crater Lake something like 8000 years ago, with impressive attention to detail. Those guys know what they're talking about, we should probably take them seriously.
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Nov 17, 2016 23:04
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Mikl posted:Leeches are also used in modern medicine, especially in reattaching severed fingers and toes: the problem in this case is that the reattached body part is full of stagnant blood that must be removed as quickly as possible to have fresh blood, full of oxygen and nutrients, enter the capillaries, or else the reattaching might fail (because of gangrene). Leeches take care of that by sucking all that nasty old blood right out. It's not so much about physically removing the blood. The circulatory system is more than capable of that; the issue is that when something gets severed, the body's natural clotting mechanisms automatically get to work sealing off the severed blood vessels. Even if you hook everything back up you've got a clog preventing blood from flowing freely. When leeches feed, though, they secrete powerful natural anticoagulants into the wound so that their host's clotting response doesn't shut off their food supply. Stick a leech next to a blood clot and it will clear that right up and reestablish circulation very quickly and efficiently.
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Jun 26, 2017 17:24
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ToxicFrog posted:This was a while ago, but Yes, it was 
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Oct 19, 2017 15:16
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Nth Doctor posted:London has rented a couple of properties from The Crown since the 13th century. Nobody knows where they are, but the city still pays rent annually of: a sharp axe, a dull knife, six large horseshoes, and sixty one nails. I bet the guy who haggled the 61st nail out of London felt really smug about his negotiating skills
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Mar 23, 2018 15:07
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Alhazred posted:In the Kingdom of Travancore women of lower castes had to pay a "breast tax" if they wanted to cover up their breasts. One woman, called Nangeli, refused to uncover her breasts or pay the tax and after the tax man had repeatedly asked her to pay she cut off her breasts and offered them as payment. She later died of blood loss. The "breast tax" was abolished in 1859. was there an official Breast Inspector who went around enforcing the tax?
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Nov 20, 2018 23:26
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Note to self: get job at cotton swab factory before initiating murder spree plans
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Feb 1, 2019 18:54
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Trabant posted:That's true of everyone, but Einstein preferred to eat them all at once. Don't knock spider pancakes til you try them
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Mar 21, 2019 01:17
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I love all the little islands sprinkled around Japan. I can only imagine the thought process that went into creating these maps. "How many islands of note do they have over there anyhow, a bunch? Let's just go with a bunch."
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Aug 9, 2019 15:16
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Der Kyhe posted:One of the US Presidents was absolutely certain that the mammoth and/or large sloth was still alive in the western parts of the continent when he sent the first expedition towards the Pacific ocean. Thomas Jefferson, it's one of the reasons he sent Lewis & Clark out. He was obsessed with proving that America had big impressive megafauna in part because there was an idea going around intellectual circles of the era that native American animals (including humans) were inherently smaller and shittier than their Eurasian counterparts.
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Aug 9, 2019 23:45
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Krankenstyle posted:when in rome Where are you finding Czech soap in Rome?
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Dec 7, 2019 22:20
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Fader Movitz posted:Being a travel writer back in the day must have been a cool job. you tell everyone back home you're going to some far away place, then go half way there, hang around some court or tavern for a 6 months. Write down some stuff, make some stuff up. I'm sure those Swedes are essentially orcs and no ones gonna know better anyway. Go back home, be celebratet as a daring traveler and scientist. My favorite is the Chinese embassy to Rome that made it all the way to the eastern border of the empire and then gave up because they were told that the Mediterranean was too long and treacherous (during the golden age of the Roman Empire no less.) So they just turned around and went home with gossip and hearsay they picked up from around Syria. Which is still pretty impressive, mind you. Gan Ying posted:The Kingdom of Da Qin [the Roman Empire] is also called Lijian. As it is found to the west of the sea, it is also called the Kingdom of Haixi ("West of the Sea"). The territory extends for several thousands of li. It has more than four hundred walled towns. There are several tens of smaller dependent kingdoms. The walls of the towns are made of stone. They have established postal relays at intervals, which are all plastered and whitewashed. There are pines and cypresses, as well as trees and plants of all kinds. Gan Ying posted:Their kings are not permanent. They select and appoint the most worthy man. If there are unexpected calamities in the kingdom, such as frequent extraordinary winds or rains, he is unceremoniously rejected and replaced. The one who has been dismissed quietly accepts his demotion, and is not angry. The people of this country are all tall and honest. They resemble the people of the Middle Kingdom and that is why this kingdom is called Da Qin. This country produces plenty of gold [and] silver, [and of] rare and precious they have luminous jade, "bright moon pearls", Haiji rhinoceroses, coral, yellow amber, opaque glass, whitish chalcedony [i.e., langgan], red cinnabar, green gemstones, gold-thread embroideries, woven gold-threaded net, delicate polychrome silks painted with gold, and asbestos cloth. Gan Ying posted:They also have a fine cloth which some people say is made from the down of "water sheep", but which is made, in fact, from the cocoons of wild silkworms. They blend all sorts of fragrances, and by boiling the juice, make a compound perfume. [They have] all the precious and rare things that come from the various foreign kingdoms. They make gold and silver coins. Ten silver coins are worth one gold coin. They trade with Anxi and Tianzhu by sea. The profit margin is ten to one. ... The king of this country always wanted to send envoys to the Han, but Anxi, wishing to control the trade in multi-coloured Chinese silks, blocked the route to prevent [the Romans] getting through [to China]. Also, yes, they literally called Rome "Great China" or "Great China of the west" because they had no terms to describe an empire of that magnitude except the ones they used to describe their own.
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Feb 14, 2020 17:18
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Alhazred posted:The platypus was one of the reason why Darwin started to doubt creationism and the thought of an omnipotent creator. He realized that the platypus more or less occupied the same ecological niche that the water vole did in Britain. Why then did an almighty creator then create two different animals to fill the same ecological niche Darwin asked himself, the only answer would be that they weren't created but evolved based on their environment. this sounds like an ex post facto rationalization to come up with a more dignified explanation than looking at a platypus and saying "what the gently caress, god???"
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Feb 19, 2020 21:00
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:historical fun fact: circa 1776CE, the english ceased to speak english. actually pretty accurate, rural dialects in eastern North America preserve pre-1776 English much more authentically than anything being spoken in the British Isles today. we continued speaking proper English while the perfidious Brits descended into weird gibberish.
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Feb 21, 2020 22:06
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Krankenstyle posted:Smdh shaking my Danish head
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Feb 25, 2020 19:17
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The way I heard it, E.T wasn't the only overhyped overmarketed clunker that got everyone to realise there weren't really any good Atari games, but a disastrous bug-filled port of Pac-Man came out around the same time. Can imagine that if they even managed to gently caress up Pac-Man, people may figure home consoles are a mug's game and stick to arcades. It wasn't even just that Atari bombed a couple flagship titles, these also happened to coincide with the market getting flooded by shovelware. Atari's business model was to sell its proprietary cartridges for $40 a pop at retail (in 1980 dollars, equivalent to $infinity today), but courts ruled that they couldn't actually prevent other developers (mostly jilted Atari employees who resented the way they'd been treated) from manufacturing their own compatible cartridges. So not only did Atari have a couple expensive duds on its hands, they suddenly had to compete against a glut of cheap 3rd party titles. Even if Atari's next big name game managed to redeem itself, the idea of a curated library of expensive, quality games was kaput; the sheer quantity of cheaply produced garbage pressed prices down, and as average game quality fell consumers became less willing to gamble on new games even at the new lower prices.
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Jun 19, 2020 06:01
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:They likely would've revolted regardless of Mexico's stance on slavery because there was never any intention of becoming loyal mexicans. Immigrating into and seizing Texas had been an anglo dream since it was spanish. It wasn't really the explicit cause and the mexican government had made no effort to actually free the "indentured servants" that the white anglos all suddenly had after slavery was abolished in 1830. It certainly wasn't Santa Anna's intention. Admission as a slave state was a key goal of the Texas plan. There was land to be had elsewhere, but Texas had the climate, location, and distinct lack of Yankees to make it a prime candidate for the creation of new slave states. The Mexican authorities saw slavery as a touchstone issue for this reason and tried repeatedly to curtail it, but ultimately their authority just didn't reach into Texas and they were reluctant to send in the troops as they were frankly outnumbered even before factoring in the risk of provoking the USA. There were certainly other factors, perhaps even more pressing ones, so it is not quite correct to say that pro-slavery sentiment was the reason Texas rebelled. But it makes Texans very mad when you claim it was, so it is also extremely correct to say so.
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Aug 30, 2020 17:32
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Asterite34 posted:Isn't the popular notion of "bushido" as it's understood today mostly made up by a guy in like 1899? not quite, there was a ton of ink spent on it when it was still relevant it's true that the modern view of bushido is heavily informed by the Hagakure which was written pretty late in the game by a peacetime samurai with a chip on his shoulder that he didn't get to do more cool war things. but even then, there was still Serious Samurai Stuff happening which he commented on as a contemporary, e.g. throwing shade at the Forty-Seven Ronin despite them doing way more Serious Samurai Stuff than he ever got up to himself.
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Dec 5, 2020 07:33
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SomeDrunkenMick posted:Irish property to support Irish poverty. Yeah. The famine still occurred in living memory of a time when Catholics could not legally hold own land; things were gradually changing by the time the Famine hit, but a small Protestant minority still held the vast majority of the land. The famine itself was a major catalyst for land redistribution (although it was still barely a start), since there was a lot of land up for grabs due to landlords going bankrupt from lack of living tenants. Maybe that's what is meant by Britain hurting from the famine too 
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Feb 14, 2021 07:45
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Milo and POTUS posted:Those masts seem tiny Yeah, like, even if you live thousands of miles away from open water and don't know the first thing about boats the proportions just intuitively looked super hosed up. It looks like they built it wrong, as a joke.
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Apr 12, 2021 06:25
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girl dick energy posted:The "See also" has some real winners, including the surprisingly long list of inventors killed by their own inventions. Shameful, they don't even have the bludgeoning death of Sir William Blunt-Instrument listed.
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Jun 1, 2021 13:34
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Platystemon posted:The Navajo, in turn, gave us “Anasazi”, meaning “enemy ancestors”. When I first heard that you're not supposed to use "Eskimo" I assumed it was bastardized French or something and that's why they don't like it. Nope, it comes from the languages of their southern neighbors who have been oppressing them a lot longer than Europeans (the Inuit weren't living in an arctic wasteland just for funsies.)
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Aug 24, 2021 13:56
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CoolCab posted:no one knows. definitely not the mysteriously fair haired and skinned population of the nearby indigenous people with their crazy tales of "our ancestors actually integrated following rough conditions, I have white great grandparents because we have lived in peace for generations" probably a curse of some kind. so you're saying they sailed to the Yucatan, accidentally fell through a time portal, and built the "Mayan" pyramids??
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Aug 28, 2021 03:35
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CoolCab posted:one of the most ingenious bugs of all time to be fair, it wasn't like they left a big cartoon microphone in there. they didn't find it because it relied on a technology that the american government didn't even fully understand yet, thus it's amazing name. it was totally passive and relied on energy broadcast from afar which is similar to RFID chips. wikipedia posted:The Thing was designed by Soviet Russian inventor Léon Theremin,[4] best known for his invention of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument. Ah, so a wizard did it.
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Sep 20, 2021 18:24
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Why are they called "Swedish meatballs" anyway? in this context "Swedish" mostly seems to mean "not served with tomato-based sauce."
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Oct 25, 2021 15:07
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Ghost Leviathan posted:There actually were Zeus worshiping places who'd be all 'What are you talking about, you weird pervert, Zeus is faithful to his wife' iirc. As I understand it a lot of the "Zeus gets around" myths were the result of people trying to insert local deities/mythical ancestors into the Olympian mythos, so I wouldn't be terribly surprised if most of them were largely unknown outside of the place they originated.
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May 10, 2022 13:39
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To be fair, Lastname is a pretty stupid name.
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May 12, 2022 14:51
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Fighting Trousers posted:If I recall, they were fed up with the anti-Catholicism of the American troops (especially the state militias, who war crimed all over the drat place), and decided they'd rather fight *for* fellow Catholics than against. They were also pretty abusive towards the immigrant enlistees, who were already getting the raw end of the deal.
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Jul 28, 2022 02:54
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FreudianSlippers posted:"thousands of victims over several decades. This is obviously a large and well organised Satanic cult" Right under the nose of the church, too. The whole thing stinks, the priests have to be in on it. There's no way they could have pulled this off otherwise.
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Dec 17, 2022 21:33
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wheatpuppy posted:E: Also on the topic of skulls, Cope's own noggin went AWOL at multiple points after his death. Clearly the work of vengeful plesiosaur ghosts.
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Jan 19, 2023 02:05
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At no point is there any suggestion that the Swedish Chef is actually preparing Swedish cuisine. The dishes he attempted were generally very basic and mostly chosen for the potential to have something explode, fight back, flail frantically, and incorporate puns or words that sound funny in fake Swedish.
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Jan 24, 2023 16:55
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Alhazred posted:A fun fact about this is that Charles XII fled from a war he was losing against Peter the Great. His host, Ahmed 3rd, then got so sick of him that he sent 4000 soldiers to get rid of him, the only thing that preventing the soldiers from massacring Charles XII and his entourage was the sultan had given strict orders that the king in exile was to be captured alive. Charles XII then spent a year in a prison cell and only decided to return to Sweden when he learned that he was going to be replaced with his sister. During his time in exile he had racked up a huge debt and his debtors went with him to make sure they got paid. Charles XII then disguised himself with a brown wig and fled from the debtors. Is this what people mean when they say "king poo poo"?
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Jan 26, 2023 20:56
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Dopilsya posted:The proper term to use here is "firearm" NOT gun. "Gun" encompasses weapons like mortars and artillery pieces that Agatha Christie did not have characters murder people with. By using 'gun' you are misrepresenting the works of Agatha Christie to the public and promoting ignorance of firearms. In the future, you need to educate yourself and do better. hmm, no.
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Feb 24, 2023 23:54
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