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ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

So it came up on the first page, but how exactly did banners control units? Did they have a flag under them that would signal various things, and someone would blow a horn when it was time to look? Were they purely rallying points? Did the scots actually use bagpipes to give orders?

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ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

Canister is the buckshot one?

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

That krrc entry where the guy killed 3 germans in a cellar with an axe :stonk:

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

Epicurius posted:

This is more of a true crime book than a military history one, but David King's "Death in the City of Light", which is about the manhunt for a serial killer in Paris. The thing is, this is going on in 1943, while Paris is under German military occupation.

That sounds super interesting. Will see if I can find this

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

With phalanxes and the poke/push thing it always seemed unlikely to me that in a fight where there's a good chance your enemy is trying to kill you that you'd not try and stab him first instead of pushing him around.

Has anyone ever given a bunch of phalanx equipment to those reenactor folks and told them to figure it out? Even with blunted weapons and whatnot would that still likely result in some serious injuries?

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

When it runs out of torpedoes you load it up with filler metal start ramming the poo poo out of everything.

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

Currently accepted reason for the explosion is the poorly designed control rods with carbon tips dropping. Massive upswing in moderation led to a huge spike in power flash boiling all the water and blowing the roof off, ejecting the now ruined fuel rods.

The doc they showed us in training spoke about 30000 % rated power.

The whole thing was a goddamn mess. Another plant refused to do the test because they thought it was loving stupid. "Let's flip all the safety systems off and see what happens". Commissioning exists for a reason, test that poo poo when it's empty.

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

chitoryu12 posted:

I think it might depend on exactly how you transition. If your method of ending the monarchy is storming the palace and decapitating everyone whose clothes look too fancy, your new government is probably going to be full of sociopaths looking for people to oppress and kill because those are the kinds of people who have no qualms about violent revolution.

This should be posted every time someone goes harping on about the guillotine and killing every person with more money than them.

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

Marxist-Jezzinist posted:

It'd be nice if we could cut that down even more so we aren't tempted to join in any more overseas jollies

I don't think anything will stop the brits from getting tanked overseas

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016


I realise they're protective vests but every part of this makes me scream no internally

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

zoux posted:

Watching Chernobyl and I'm reminded there are so many different units for radiation: curies, Roentgens, rads, rems, gY, sieverts, etc. Are these are measuring different things or could there be some sort of unified metric

Different measures of radiation based on some poo poo I can't remember. rem (radiation equivalent?) are meant to be a standard that take into account the different dangers of the different types of radiation. Like alpha has a (dose in gray?)*20 and beta like a *5 I think.

100 rem = 1 sievert and if you absorb that much you've died. I think our annual dose limit set by regulation was 20 milli, but the company would cut you off for the year at 10.

Someone who has google a bit more handy can probably answer that clearer

ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

GotLag posted:

Sounds like what you're really saying is "it's too expensive to safely remediate them all"

Not neccessarily expensive, but dangerous. If it's inert and safely being held in the walls then it's fine, if cracks start showing or in the event of a fire/collapse then yeah, you gotta do something about it.

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ilmucche
Mar 16, 2016

Squalid posted:

this thread isn't much use if people are just yelling and posturing. There's plenty of other places to do that on the forum.

I find the intersection of violence and politics fascinating. In many conflicts the legality of actions is determined retroactively. It's also interesting to see instances in which political violence is deemed acceptable.



This is a picture from May Day in Paris. Anthropologically, I find this to be an extremely interested custom, although it is confusing. See every year the state squares up against the radicals and together they have a nice little riot. Everything is amazingly well organized and disciplined. Scheduled Everyone comes on schedule and participants fall into one of three teams: police, protester, and media. Each has an easily identifiable uniform and a well defined role in the performance. Protestors can use molotovs, fireworks and clubs but not guns or bladed weapons. Police use tear gas, rubber bullets and batons but not guns either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoxsDkB-rWU


It's so formalistic, its almost more like a sport than a protest. Before clashes start journalists are carefully herded out of the way. Press can mingle somewhat freely with either side so long as they are correctly marked, after all you wouldn't want to look bad in the papers. And yet despite the organization every year people suffer disfiguring burns, or a rubber bullet to the eye, or are even killed. And then they do it again the next year. It is political violence, but it violence that is highly normalized, if not entirely accepted. I'm not sure what exactly is accomplished, but it seems like at the end of the day most people go home satisfied.

Varying levels of extra-legal force and violence are an accepted part of political activism in essentially every country, the United States included. For example, many people within the African-American community see riots as to some extent justified as a form of political protest, following what they see as expressions of injustice, as after the Rodney King trial. It is an extremely expensive and wasteful form of expression, but common nevertheless. When violence reaches the level of civil war or insurgency, the legality of actions will typically be determined retroactively.

In the most extreme cases where the state realizes it has lost the monopoly of force and has no hope of imposing its will by force, it must negotiate. Almost all civil wars end with general amnesties. That inevitably means killers and murderers get to go home like nothing happened, and will never face any kind of justice. Often they even get to keep that which they took by force. In this world power is never absolute, there is always a negotiation.

In the case of Confederate statues, I think many of their defenders have made some serious missteps. The southern state houses have assumed that they don't have to negotiate, and that they can impose these statues on cities, universities, and other communities by force of law, regardless of local opposition. This I believe is a mistake. What will they do if the city police refuse to investigate, the local district attorney refuses to prosecute, and the city council refuses to remediate damage? It puts them in a hard place politically.

I realise this was a week ago, but this is atrociously written satire about labour day in France right?

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