|
Rodrigo Diaz posted:Yes, but to the best of my knowledge enslavement was for noncombatants. Crusade warfare also had an element of enslavement, which I should have mentioned, especially because it sowed the seed for the systems of the 16th - 19th centuries which we know and love. Yeah, the Vikings in particular enslaved women, most of whom were sold off to slave traders who later went on to sell the slaves in Byzantium and the Islamic world. At least that seems to have been the case for Eastern Europe, for Ireland and such it might seem that most of the slaves ended up on the domestic market so to speak. Having slave concubines was pretty common in Scandinavian societies and especially in Iceland where enslaved Irish women made up the initial majority of the female population, as the Scandinavian settlers were almost all men. As for the Crusades, the enslavement of battle captives, soldiers and non-combatants alike, was very common in the Islamic world, especially as there was in fact a demand for slaves with military skills*. I'm not entirely sure of the specifics but it seems to have been somewhat similar to how it often was with the Romans where enslaved captives were distributed amongst the soldiers to keep or sell off as they wished, which is probably why at Jerusalem when Saladin showed clemency towards (part of) the population and defenders he is noted to have paid the ransom for them, which probably means that he compensated his soldiers for the loss of their booty so to speak. *though the preference here was for young men and teenagers who could be further educated and trained for specific duties, it's often important to note that Mamluks and such weren't as much "slave soldiers" as they were "recruited from slaves". I believe it's an important distinction to make because the status of Mamluks really was not that similar to any other slaves and as part of the military elite their status was also above that of the vast majority of the free population as well (and in Egypt and Delhi and other places they typically saw themselves as a distinct and superior group from the population at large, especially when they seized power).
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2019 22:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:52 |
|
|
xthetenth posted:Wasn't a lot of the deal with Mamluks and similar that they were enslaved, but eventually manumitted, with the practice being that manumitted slaves were considered and to be treated as part of the former owner's household, making a group that were quite literally household troops, as well as being culturally distinct to a greater degree than even being part of a military subculture? I'm not sure about the universality of such a practice but I think I can remember reading at one time that part of some sort of Mamluk training/education was that the conversion to Islam involved being freed. Though I can't remember where I read that and I can't say how common that was. My point more generally is that whether they were formally freed or not, was that their status as Mamluks so superceded their status as slaves or freedmen (in many slave societies, not just the Islamic world, there are alot of similarities in the status of slaves and freedmen, as you mention freedmen typically legalled remained the wards of their masters, the difference being more one of degree than much else) that they become something completely different from the rest of the slave population, and as the military (and often administrative elite) they stood above the free population as well as officers, governors, ministers and "ordinary" elite soldiers. It's probably not a surprise to anyone in this thread that they do not have much in common with how slave soldiers are depicted in fiction and fantasy (think of the unsullied in GOT) in that for all that they are soldiers they are still expected to be servile and seem to occupy a humiliating position in society compared to free citizens. Not really so with Mamluks at all really who were aware of their status, proud of their distinct origins and typically disdainful of most others outside their own group. That's probably part of the reason Mamluks and similar soldiers ended up seizing power in, or otherwise dominating, many Islamic states, because of how they saw themselves in relation to society at large. You touched on it a little bit, but part of the reason such soldiers were recruited to begin with a general pre-modern conception that, for a ruler, foreigners are often more loyal and reliable than a country's indigenous elites. The reasoning being that foreigners were not part of the existing networks of power within the elite and thus really had no other patron or ally than their employer, thus their loyalty was more absolute and less likely to become compromised, especially in cases of civil war and such. Thus you often see foreign mercenaries and such compose an elite core, especially household and guard troops of many rulers (this goes beyond Islamic societies, think of the Swiss guards of the Pope and the Bourbon kings for instance). That reasoning then goes a bit further in the Islamic world and arrives at the conclusion that ofcourse foreign slaves would be even more loyal than just foreigners in general. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Sep 20, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2019 02:06
|
|
|
Phanatic posted:I think Hugo Boss is designing for Macy’s. Huh. On the topic of that it's funny that Hugo Boss actually didn't design either the Germany army or the SS uniforms. It's really kind of a myth. Hugo Boss was a big time nazi though and operated factories with slave labor, some of which were later turned over to produce (but not design, they produced the uniforms to specifications essentially) uniforms for the army during the war. He did design a couple of Nazi party gauleiter uniforms (I think later in the war), but that's not generally what people think of when they say that Hugo Boss made the nazi uniforms, because it seems they mean the grey army uniforms. I've also heard a competing but much less repeated myth, that Coco Chanel was involved in designing the German army uniforms. Though I think that one's essentially been debunked as a myth as well. Really the design was mostly just derived from the older uniforms throughout the 20s and 30s until it arrived at the point where we recognize it as the "Nazi uniforms". Arquinsiel posted:I love that they didn't even remove the bolt so there's a slim chance that the Jawa's "Ion Blaster" could still fire. I don't know about the Jawa guns being functional, but a bunch of the guns used in Star Wars were functional, at least the Sterling SMGs they used for the guns the Stormtroopers use, and were used to fire blanks during shooting (which I believe was pretty helpful in making the gun battles more real and not having the actors and extras just pretend to be firing guns, also helped the editors in deciding where to put in laser blasts), in the original Star Wars you can see ejected casings a couple of times when they weren't edited out for whatever reason. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Sep 21, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2019 19:55
|
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:As is the case with most uniform design the stuff that works stays and the stuff that loses their function and fashion just fade away. Yeah. Also of note is that both West and East Germany kept using essentially the same style of uniform after the war, though generally the East German ones are thought to look much closer to the WW2 era uniforms than the West German ones (I believe part of that is the colors they used, the cut of both the East and West German uniforms remained pretty similar to that used under Nazi Germany), and that it's not too uncommon to refashion East German uniforms to look like WW2 uniforms and sell them to people who want to buy a Nazi uniform. Also I guess some who want the WW2 uniform buy East German uniforms because they generally seem to be more available.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2019 20:06
|
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:Somewhere out there a cafe of Broken Dreams exists for out of fashion uniform and armor trends. Well, modern German dress uniforms essentially look like evolved versions of the type of uniform they wore during WW2, so I wouldn't say that the trend it represented went out of fashion. And there's also what I said above about both East and West Germany keeping the WW2-style uniforms and developing them over the years. 
Randarkman fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Sep 21, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2019 20:24
|
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:Coco Chanel was absolutely a Nazi spy, though. One who took advantage of her connections with the party to get her competitors and unwanted employees sent to concentration camps for her own benefit. Oh, yeah. But it's still, as far as I know, a myth that she had a hand in designing the Wehrmacht uniforms. Also a much less common myth than the one that says Hugo Boss did it (though there's at least some truth to that one as regards the later gauleiter uniforms) Randarkman fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Sep 21, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2019 20:30
|
|
|
Arquinsiel posted:ETA: it also implies that the Jawa's ion gun is a bolt action, because, ye know, the bolt is still there. Of course the Jawa energy weapon is operated by bolt action, I mean how else would it work? This is Star Wars. Are you implying that Chewie's laser crossbow also makes no sense being shaped like a crossbow? Randarkman fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Sep 22, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2019 05:39
|
|
|
On the topic of that, one of the things I find to among the chief failings of the new Star Wars movies (well, it's kind of a distant point compared to how they generally fail as movies and on a plot and character level, but that's another topic entirely), both prequel and sequel, is how they didn't really go about constructing the movies' arsenals in the same way, in that they are mostly non-functional props constructed from the ground up to look like sci-fi weapons (or made to look like the weapons of the originals) rather than the originals where they took real guns and glued or bolted stuff on them to make them look sci-fi, which somehow makes them look more authentic somehow and the universe feel more real and "lived in". Now looking at it, most of the guns used appear to have been whatever could be gotten for cheap at the time the movies were made and where they were made, which means surplus and in the 70s and 80s that seems to have meant a bunch of WWII crap and other stuff that was being phased out of use at the time (such as the Sterling SMGs). Most of this happens to be British, because obviously the principal filming location was England, but there's a noticeable amount of German crap there as well, like MG-42s and Sturmgewehrs, probably because of the shoots in Tunisia I would imagine (Eastern bloc countries came into posession of alot of captured German materiel following WWII and though much of it remained in use among police and reserve forces into the 60s it was eventually all taken out of use, and much ended up being dumped off on various Third World countries, this is a big part of the reason why you occasionally spot German WW2 equipment in Middle Eastern conflict, it's not just from the war itself but because of this post-war aid of sorts given by Eastern Bloc countries). It would have been interesting to see how the prop guys would have gone about making the surplus crap of the 90s, 2000s and 2010s into sci-fi weapons, like FN FALs, G3s and, depending on where filming was conducted (if it wasn't almost entirely on a sound stage like episodes II and III) maybe a bunch of old Warsaw Pact stuff as well. But yeah, no such luck on that. A bit sad I think.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2019 05:58
|
|
|
Siivola posted:That's literally what they did for Rogue One and it's actually kind of jarring to spot a pistol made out of an AR lower and camera kit. Ah, I'd kind of forgotten about Rogue One. Though I'm not that surprised to learn this, the production design and visuals in that movie kind of was the single standout, the movie looked really good, and it had dumb dated stuff like thick analog cables and blocky data storage tapes, which fits right into Star Wars in my opinion. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Sep 22, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2019 08:33
|
|
|
The talk on tank production and industrial organization given by Jonathan Parshall during this conference from 2013 has long been one of my favorite videos on youtube and one I really like to link to people who might have an interest in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ&t=1580s Here's a link if for some reason you've been around this thread and haven't seen it (guessing that's few enough people, because I think I got a link to this video from this thread and it's come up a number of times). I recently decided I'd like to see if there were some other interesting things brought up in it, as I think most or all of it is on youtube. I kind of like lectures in any case. One thing that was pretty interesting was one that was a brief overview of the Soviet civilian homefront and how incredibly dire things where and how little resources they actually had to work with in contrast to the common thought of the Soviet Union having an inexhaustible reserve of manpower and resources, in fact they lost some one third or more of their citizens citizens when Germany occupied much of the the western regions and while industry, through massive efforts managed to rebuild, recover and expand, agriculture pretty much collapsed and did not fully recover (and due to collectivization and purges before the war was already in a pretty bad state) either during or after the war, and during the war pretty much the entire population was starving and what little was produced mostly went to the army. Lend-Lease spam was kind of a lifesaver in that case, as it allowed a little bit more of the meager agricultural surplus to go towards the starving civilian population (still it seems that even throughout 1942 at least, substantially more Lend-Lease food went to Great Britain than to the Soviet Union). The collapse of agriculture during the war is pretty interesting as it sheds some light the post-war situation where one of Khruschev's great failures that contributed to his downfall was the overall failure of his agricultural policies and paved the way for the situation that eventually developed where the Soviet Union grew ever more dependent on US grain imports. However my favorite talk (well, other than the tank production one) that I found by watching the conference videos ended up being one that perhaps didn't teach me as much new stuff, but a talk given by a former US army colonel (not in WWII) about the fighting in Italy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z9thhzjkk0&t=684s Mostly I really liked it due to liking the style of the speaker, he's pretty clear and concise and also dryly amusing. Though mostly the way he refers to the Germans was great to hear, talking about Kesselring, he says he was perhaps one of the best generals of the war, and also a war criminal who was responsible for the deliberate massacres of thousands of Italian civilians among others. And upon getting to a mention of Rommel, he says he's not going to show a picture of him because he's tired of him and that he was a little poo poo who cheated on his taxes. Not the most enlightening of talks by any means, but, in my opinion a really enjoyable one. Thought I'd share it.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2019 03:01
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I always wonder how accurate those notional TOEs are - guys are going to scavenge all kinds of poo poo that they prefer using, and it's not like they're going to give back a couple of DTs that happen to fall off the Studebaker somewhere. As said those TOEs are very much paper things, almost especially so with the Soviets whose command and organizational structure went through an ungodly amount of stress and often had to be downsized to make up for losses and lack of trained officers due to attrition (not to mention the issue with communications personnel and equipment). One thing I have read on a number of occasionas is that Guards units frequently had significantly more DPs per platoon (maybe double the amount) than normal infantry units, this seems to have been an allotment thing in origin and not just scrounging, kind of the same as Guards receiving double pay at all ranks (or at least all enlisted ranks, I think officers may have still received the normal pay) they were also alloted more and better equipment if possible.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 23, 2019 19:07
|
|
|
ChubbyChecker posted:How reliable were the DP's drums? I've understood that eg. the larger Thompson drums weren't usually fully loaded because it made malfunctions much likelier. The DP doesn't use a drum magazine though, don't know much about the reliabiltiy of the pan magazine. PPSh with the drum magazine also had the same problem in that they were highly prone to jams when you loaded them fully up, which led to a preference among many soldiers for the box magazines and incentives to produce more of those.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2019 10:39
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:It’s a pan magazine. The cartridges are radially stored within the magazine versus axially. Also, some pan magazines do not use spring followers and instead use a recoil driven cam system to rotate the magazine. This is how the Lewis gun works, not sure about the DP. Yeah, if you look up images of the magazines you can see how they (DP and PPSh) are quite different from each other. (PPSh drum above, DP pan below)   e: Here's a video where a guy shows how the DP pan magazine works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmejwl0ddjw Randarkman fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Sep 24, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2019 12:00
|
|
|
ChubbyChecker posted:AA guns were good at AT also because their mounts made it easy to hit at moving targets. And the mounts made many naval guns good at AA as posted earlier. AT guns derived from AA guns typically were not fielded with their AA mounts, they were typically of the wheeled and towed variety.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2019 09:50
|
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:It will be remembered, the US armed forces will always have flair with every uniform generation now either with fashion or function. They're bringing back World War stuff? If the US was bringing some uniforms back I kind of wish they'd bring back the old dark blue Union uniforms. That's a pretty neat color, you don't really need to blend in with khaki or green and poo poo for anything that isn't a BDU. Bring back the blues. Why not. Also I guess it might piss of Conservatives because they actually kind of hate America.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2019 14:15
|
|
|
ChubbyChecker posted:good choice, swedish wine doesn't sound very good Where I grew up in Norway (south east, between Oslo and Drammen) there's farmers who are now looking at going into wine production, setting up connections with people in France and such, hiring, going to on trips and courses and such to learn about it. The reason essentially being that due to the wonders of global warming, the climate in southern Norway is now quite similar to what you had in Bourdeaux and such about 200 years or so ago, and the conditions for grapes and such are actually pretty good. I don't think anythings's come to fruition as of yet, but a childhood friend of mine is now essentially running one of the larger farms (which is somewhat known nationally for producing ciders and such) looking into this, so I'll probably get my hands on some of it when the time comes. Then again I am not someone who knows alot about what makes wine good, other than it tasting nice and getting incredibly drunk on wine is a very different experience from getting incredibly drunk on beer. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Oct 3, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2019 14:45
|
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:A 30 minute long general British Army training film. I've had this recommended to me for the past couple of days. Really glad I watched it now. Everyone's forgot to mention it has Canadians (pretty much all the soldiers in the demonstrations and such far as I can tell, though that Sergeant who sounded like a mix of Eric Idle and Michael Palin was not Canadian, unless some Canadians spoke like that back then). So, I guess the "1930's" in the video title might be a bit off.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2019 10:19
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:I was confused as to if they were using some kind of british accent I'd never heard of or not. Other than Herr Korporal and the dude that I'm pretty sure is Darling everyone sounds wayyyy to close to home to be 1930s or 40s brits. The accents definitely give it away, I mean just listen to the way the guy commanding the 2pdr says "fire", it's like Bob and Doug McKenzie. Also they have patches on their shoulders which say "CANADA".
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2019 20:07
|
|
|
In my heart, everywhere is Canada.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2019 21:08
|
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:Oh god, I wonder if any of those Canadians died at Dieppe in those films Well. Can anyone tell what unit they are from? Don't know how easy to spot Canadian/Commonwealth unit badges are. Dieppe would be 2nd Canadian infantry. Though I'm not sure if regiments and such were often attached and detached from divisions in the Canadian army, so it's possible that knowing their regiment might be more useful if one really wanted to know... Randarkman fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Oct 6, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2019 23:09
|
|
|
Speaking of that it's kind of annoying how the proscription of the Knights Templar and their persecution, arrest and trial by King Phillip is so often viewed out of context, especially by those reading or writing about dumb conspiracies, pagan secret societies and holy grails. If you read up a little bit on Phillip IV, who was variously known as "the Fair" (as in handsome) and "the Iron King", you'll quickly realize that the whole Templar affair is kind of typical of how he operated, if still impressive in its scale and efficiency. The charges levelled against the Templars are very similar to those he also accused other political figures of throughout his life, especially when dealing with the French Church and the Papacy. Simply put, Phillip IV, who was an exceptionally ambitious and energetic king, needed money and wanted to extend the power of the central government over his country and its finances and put his considerable military, legal and religious resources towards achieving these end. Also because France at this time was the most powerful and organized kingdom in Europe and Phillip was constantly bullying the Papacy in order to control the Pope, most other countries simply had to go along with it when Phillip did such things as proscribing the Knights Templar, though in most places outside the reach of France, there were no trials and the local chapters instead disbanded and reorganized as new localized orders which continued exisiting, though many ended up eventually disbanding or being absorbed by other orders and such. Anyway, I encourage anyone to read about the reign of Phillip IV, he is certainly one of the most interesting and able of French kings, and medieval kings in general, and he was absolutely ruthless.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2019 20:30
|
|
|
Milo and POTUS posted:I think he sounds like a dick! Possibly the biggest dick that France has ever produced. That's no mean feat.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2019 22:08
|
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:can you recommend a bio? Unfortunately I can't, because I've never read a dedicated biography about him, though now you've got me thinking that maybe I should look into correcting that. Most of my run-ins with him have been as a result of my studies, particularly when I took a course on Church reform in the Middle Ages, I'd recommend a book I bought and read for that course though which is The Medieval Church: A Brief History, which is, in my opinion, highly readable for an academic book, it touches on Phillip the Fair in his dealings with the French Church and the Papacy quite a bit IIRC. Much of the rest of what I know about him is from various articles and book excerpts over the years, though I do believe he's also featured quite heavily in a few lectures in the Great Courses series on the Late Middle Ages, which is quite good. Hope this helps, and sorry for not having a more specific recommendation.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2019 22:25
|
|
|
Squalid posted:Reading about medieval kings and and its just like . . . can't you figure out a way to settle your petty family disputes in a way that DOESN'T involve killing hundreds of people? If Normans like Richard the Lionheart and his family were alive today I don't think they'd be able to decide what's for dinner without raising the levies and pillaging each other's castles It's kind of amusing how utterly exasperated the medieval Church was with just how violent and unruly the nobility was, and kind of depressing when they tried to introduce measures to restrict violence and warfare how much they had to dial back their expectations and demands when they actually tried to put them into effect for real. There's also the somewhat more innocent trend of court chaplains trying to civilize the nobility by writing handbooks on table etiquette, though eventually chivalric romance (mostly written by court chaplains as well, and also some by women) was much more successful in presenting generally agreeable behavior to the nobility in manner which appealed to them.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2019 22:52
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:it wasn't even the longest-lived independent country that became a state Deseret/Utah right?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2019 22:37
|
|
|
Dance Officer posted:The students from Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and an assortment of other Arab countries that I came across in university were all deeply religious people, which is like 6 years ago now. I've read some books from a Dutch anthropologist who spent several years at a university in Egypt, and he basically comes to the same conclusion. I guess it clashes with our own stereotypes of highly educated people, but belief and scientific method don't seem to be incompatible. Why would they be incompatible? I think the only people who really believe that are the stupid kind of atheist and extreme scripture literalists. I can't say much for other fields, but having studies mathematics and physics previously in my life I can tell you that religious people are not all that uncommon in those fields. If you look at the history of physics, particular of the more theoretical bent, you'll find that it isn't that uncommon to find deeply religious people among its ranks, often of the unorthodox variety, but not necessarily always. Highly theoretical subjects like mathematics and (especially theoretical) physics almost seem to me to be kind of conducive to a "religious mind" so to speak, because of their universality and the trend of unification they seem to often engender and require an appreciation for the profound if that makes sense.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2019 00:27
|
|
|
Milo and POTUS posted:Not to touch on the military present but wasn't Saladin a Kurd? Was it an attempt by Saddam to appeal to this demographic (seems extremely unlikely from what little I know about how he treated them), or was it just some plea to a glorious pan-Iraqi history or something along those lines? Saladin was indeed Kurdish, but from a heavily Arabized aristocratic family who were essentially married into the dominant Turkish military aristocracy of the Near East. He may have been of partly Turkish descent, though this is unknown, some of his brothers are known by Turkish names and his own most well-known wife was Turkish. Still Saladin faced some problems governing his empire because of his ethnicity, though that was more because he was not himself Turkish than specifically because he was Kurdish. His army and higher administration was mostly made up of Turkish soldiers, Mamluks, professional mercenaries and tribal auxiliaries. He likely would have faced similar problems in this regard if he were an Arab, which to an extent he was on a cultural and linguistic level, but at the time Arabs* kind of had even less of a military presence than Kurds did, many families, like Saladin's, were prominent in the military aristocracy of northern Syria and Iraq, and as I said, essentially married into the ruling Turkish aristocracy. Him being Kurdish has never really been much of an issue regarding his idolization in the Arab world. He himself emphasized a pan-Sunni religious policy and Muslim unity against the Crusaders, and in modern times this has kind of been appropriated by Arab Nationalists as an early expression of Pan-Arabism. Though to be honest I don't quite know how he is perceived by Kurdish people, favorably I assume, though there isn't much historical basis to claim him as a figure of Kurdish independence or nationalism, though that has rarely stopped people really. *Though note that "Arab" back then wasn't as meaningful a label as it is now and though I mentioned Saladin was to some extent significantly Arabized, he would not have been thought of as an Arab by any of his contemporaries. Turks and Kurds kind of were meaningful nationalities, because they belonged to militarily prominent, tribal populations with distinct languages and customs. Arab back then, and really until the late 19th century/early 20th mostly always referred to Bedouin, other Arabic speakers would not have thought of themselves as "Arabs" but would have identified themselves by region, which was mostly a matter of which was the dominant city in your region (not uncommon in the Middle East for the name of a city to refer to the entire attached region so to speak), so they'd be referred to as being from Mosul, Aleppo, Alexandria, Damascus, etc. edit: And to kind of answer the actual question, Saddam Hussein's adoration of Saladin most likely stems from the general pan-Arabist adoration of him, of which the Baathists are counted as part of. Also they happened to share a birthplace, Tikrit, which Saddam would emphasize to draw comparisons in propaganda. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Oct 10, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2019 07:29
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Kingdom of Hawaii - 83 years Wow. I honestly thought that was much longer. I blame Victoria 1 and 2.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2019 14:35
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Specifically, they felt that war with the US was probably inevitable and time was not on Japan's side. This kind of fatalism seems pretty common in countries where the civilian authorities have little to no direct authority over the military or are unable to properly exercize it. It was pretty prevalent in Germany in the years leading up to WW1 as well in the figure of "Germany is being surrounded by hostile powers who are banding together" and "in a decade Russia will have completed her strategic railways and further industrialized, in a war they will overwhelm us with numbers at the same time we fight the French" which then gets internalized to the point of "if war is inevitable, better for Germany that it happens sooner rather than later". These kinds of countries never really seem to be able to imagine any kind of resolution to a crisis or conflict other than a military one and they rarely stop to ask themselves why other countries are banding together against them. With Germany at least this kind of attitude contributed tremenodusly to WWI breaking out because it essentially led the German leadership to go "sure, why not, whatever you want, Germany is with you" when the Austro-Hungarians wanted to go to war with Serbia when they and everybody else knew that they wouldn't dare to act without Germany's approval. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Oct 11, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2019 12:54
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:I think the fall of Russian ancien regime is a poor point of comparison. As long as the CPSU had any land area to stand on, some rifles and bayonets to defend it with and a loaf of bread to ration to workers and soldiers, there was going to be Soviet Union. Just look at what Leningrad went through. They pretty much didn't have the bread though, Germany captured the most important food production areas, which had already been hit hard by collectivization and famine (so national food production was already in a fragile place) and what was left pretty much collapsed under the strain. Lend-Lease was actually massively important in staving off (and only then barely) a nationwide famine in 1942 and 1943.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2019 16:37
|
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:Considering there is only two generals on the chart I thought the joke was kinda obvious. There aren't only two generals on the chart. The guy who made it made it mostly to amuse himself and is pretty honest about the limited applicability of the whole thing. Most of the generals he sampled with his method were distributed more or less normally (as in a normal distribution, which is what you see on the left) while Napoleon, and to a much lesser degree, Caesar broke the mould.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2019 18:00
|
|
|
chitoryu12 posted:This actually made me think of something interesting. People have declared the Henry a “first assault rifle” of sorts, firing a lower power round rapidly from a large magazine. It wasn’t great past 100 yards, but it can be effectively fired and even single loaded from empty in an emergency. How effective would an army equipped entirely with lower power lever-actions utilizing and a modern sense of combat fare against an army with rifled muskets and contemporary 1860s tactics? The 1870-1871 Russo-Turkish War is almost kind of an example of this. The Turks had purchased and were equipped with alot of weapons that were much more modern than what the Russians had, including many lever-action rifles and quick firing artillery with airburst frag shells. The Turks still lost especially because of superior Russian logistics and strategic mobility which allowed them to make very effective use of their superior numbers and exploit Turkish weaknesses, which were in many ways the inverse of the Russian strengths including deep systemic issues with infrastructure, finance and revenues and recruitment.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2019 19:23
|
|
|
TK-42-1 posted:Was there really a thing where they wouldn’t name babies until X months/years old? It seems like a myth born out of modern perceptions. I can't say for sure but at least in Christian Europe it was considered extremely important to baptize a newborn as soon as possible precisely because so many died in infancy. Because a priest often was not available on short notice, the Church ruled that a priest was not strictly necessary to carry out a baptism, midwives specifically were pointed out when it came to performing baptisms. A priest was necessary for confirmation, which confirmed a child's membership in the Christian community (and typically was carried out as soon as a priest was available), but confirmaton wasn't a necessity for salvation. I'm not sure about the case in the Middle Ages but at least today baptism and choosing a name are closely related. E: it should be pointed out that the Middle Ages weren't really significantly better or worse than most of pre-modern history when it comes to infant mortality, death in childbirth, life expectancy and general quality of life. The high middle ages though probably were a better time than Late Antiquity and the early and late middle ages because it was a time of growth (population, food production, economy) with good climatic conditions and general absence of pandemic diseases. E2: As an aside it's estimated that about 50,000 people died of malaria every year in Rome (the city). Randarkman fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Oct 19, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2019 13:49
|
|
|
St. Augustine has probably written about that.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2019 14:08
|
|
|
Libluini posted:Holy poo poo, I never thought about this, but that must be where the Catholic tradition of Konfirmation comes from in Germany. (No idea if that kind of celebration of a kid getting "confirmed" into Catholicism is practiced in other countries, so I'm going with the German name.) Yeah that's where it comes from. In many cases today there's a lot of pageantry, ceremony and importance to it that wasn't really there back in Medieval times. This is perhaps especially true in Scandinavian countries where comfirmation occurs at roughly 15 years and is an important coming-of age celebration for teenagers. This started after the introduction of protestantism. Confirmation was used as an occasion to educate young people in the Bible and Christian (that is Protestant) teachings to prepare them to be confirmed as full members of the Church (that is society). Over time this kind of morphed into a kind of early universal schooling system in early modern Scandinavia where priests in an area would travel to the farms to teach children to read and recite stuff from the Bible to prepare them for confirmation. This is likely an important reason (together with a general prosperity) why the Scandinavian countries had very high literacy rates already in the 18th century.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2019 22:26
|
|
|
Tias posted:It's not really important as 'coming of age' as much as a 'celebration', at least here in Denmark. It has developed to a form where your 15th birthday is supposed to be a big party with bigger presents than normal, and kids who want to get confirmed (provided they are already baptized, of course, otherwise they have to get baptized too). I'm not baptized, nor did I want to get confirmed, so I was what we call "nonfirmed" in slang, had a big party and got drunk with my friends. Well, I'm personally familiar with the Norwegian version and here it's still a pretty important celebration with a prominent coming of age theme (also no 15-year old drinking at least not in parties with your adult family members, which confirmations always will be here, then again Norway's alcohol legislation is much stricter than Denmark's). It's also worth noting that there's also developed a tradition of secular/civil/humanist confirmation (organized by the humanist society) for those who have not been baptized and/or who would rather excize the religious elements of the ceremony. In alot of ways they are still very similar though in that you have a period of education beforehand (typically human rights and such for the secular variant) and then a long, boring, pompous ceremony (in a church if traditional or in some place like a theater or town hall if secular) for all the confirmants at once followed by a private family party for each one. I think the split now is about 50/50 traditional and secular. I did secular, mostly because I was not baptized (though like most others I was still registered as a Church member, which I did not discover until many years later), though I know of several examples of people my age getting baptized to get a regular confirmation with their friends (back then I think there were more traditional than secular confirmations as well). Having been the subject of a secular one and having sat through several others (of both kinds) I have to say that I'd rather sit through one of the traditional ceremonies again. Somehow they've always been shorter and felt way less boring than the secular ones I've attended (maybe we beat them out in the education, but that was pretty dull and poorly presented as well). A bit off-topic but kind of interesting to see the differences here. One friend of mine actually had a 'nonfirmation' in that they used that word to describe it, but otherwise it wasn't really like you describe for Denmark, they just dispensed with everything except the family party at the end.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2019 12:01
|
|
|
Tias posted:Yeah, there's no ritual to it if you don't do the church, though my family did hold some speeches and dispense a little wisdom on me, which seems to be common, at least in more bourgeois families. Possibly, Norway only recently moved away from the state church concept (though I think it still applies mostly, the change is mostly just cosmetic). Although not commonly seen as such, in relation to it's neighbors Norway has long been and still is the most Christian of the Scandinavian countries, though this has often manifested itself in the popularity of Evangelical movements of various sorts. The increased importance of the confirmation ritual might be down to that, but could also be that the educational aspect of the ritual might have been more important in Norway, being larger and with a smaller and more dispersed population (those teacher-priests who travelled to the farms and taught the children to prepare them for confirmation were pretty important). The educational aspect is still emphasized in both the traditional/church variant and secular/humanist variant. The structure of the two is essentially identical, with a couple of months of after school classes (once or twice a week IIRC) and maybe a weekend retreat, they only differ by content.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2019 14:33
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:All this talk about wargaming military theory reminds me of that post about a guy having a lot of success using soviet doctrine in wargames. I believe, at least in the Soviet period, that part of the reason for this being important in Soviet training (drilling, practised formations for disembarking from an APC and such, was pretty important in Soviet training) is the Soviet appraising their own recruits and what they felt was more useful and possible to teach them. You have to remember that in the ground forces, particularly in infantry units there were alot of non-Russians, many of whom had little exposure to Russian prior to being recruited and the degree to which they could be commanded by Russian and Ukrainian officers (NCOs played a pretty limited role as unit leaders in the Soviet army it seems, many of their tasks instead being hoisted onto junior officers, sergeants and corporals and such were more often technical and weapon specialists) was often limited. Their proportional representation in the ground forces was also much greater than in the population at large, because for several more prestigious and sensitive services such as the air and misisle forces most ethnic groups outside of Russians and Ukrainians were considered suspect, so these were overwhelmingly made up of Russians and Ukrainians, while the less trustworthy ethnicities (especially non-European ones, of which Central Asians were pretty much at the bottom of the rung) made up a good bulk of the less prestigious ground forces, in particular the infantry.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2019 15:19
|
|
|
Milo and POTUS posted:It's proof that making firearms is best left to the professionals. Not that she was a gunsmith but I think she was in the Army Corps of Engineers.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2019 15:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:52 |
|
|
P-Mack posted:He's the guy who swallowed SLA Marshall's completely made up '75% of soldiers in WWII wouldn't shoot their weapon' factoid and revived it for a new generation of terrible opinion pieces and facebook comments. I actually thought people were talking about Vasily Grossman at first, who was one of the most active front line Soviet military reporters, who is perhaps most well known for his reports on the Holocaust and was one of the first journalists to cover Auschwitz. He later became pretty disillusioned and was persecuted for his work when the Soviet authorities wanted to downplay the fact that Jews had been specifically targeted (and that Belorussians, Ukrainians and Russians had participated in the Holocaust). Randarkman fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Oct 31, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2019 13:32
|
|