Milhist Thread: pusillanimous tohubohu

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: pusillanimous tohubohu

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

The other thing about battleships in modern combat is that while the hull may be heavily enough armored to stand up to anything short of a nuke, the sensors and communications systems are not.

Seems like you could mission-kill one about as easily as a non-BB. Sure it's still afloat but it won't be able to contribute much to the ongoing battle.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2020 06:33

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 14:32

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Acebuckeye13 posted:

I've thought about this on and off for a long time, and I think it comes down to the simple fact it'd be a hard film to write and even harder to film. Not impossible, but difficult enough that it would deter all but the most dedicated screenwriter, and (to date) all directors and production companies.

Also, there's no real demonstrated market demand for WWII naval movies. MIDWAY and GREYHOUND didn't exactly do gangbuster business.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2020 01:44

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Arrinien posted:

I saw it and quite enjoyed it, although at this point I basically just remember Tom Hanks yelling HARD TO PORT for an hour and a half. I've been told by people in the Navy that it's a pretty accurate depiction of what it's like to be on the bridge of a surface combatant in a combat situation.

It was an incredibly straightforward movie. All but about four minutes were this destroyer, the convoy it was trying to protect, and the perilous crossing of the mid-atlantic gap between US/UK air cover. No side plots, no love interests (Elzabeth Shue shows up in one scene at the very start, and that's it), no character arcs, no narrative twists - just trying to get those ships across safely. Stripped-down and very to the point, in a way that's extremely rare these days.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2020 09:00

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Liddell Hart also had a pet explanation for all of military strategy (which boiled down to "don't attack in the obvious place, dummy") that he kept trying to promote, and I always thought that a lot of his historical writing was done with an bias towards promoting his particular take on strategy.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2020 21:26

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

Sweden was a neutral country, and neutral countries are allowed to do things like trade. They weren't an occupied country like France. That would not be bombing Germany with Swedish collateral damage, but simply declaring war on Sweden.

Operationally, the Swedish iron mines are at out of range of 1940 bombers, and attacking baltic shipping means traipsing into German airspace and doing low-level attack. Not really viable.

Also, every bomber used to attack Swedish iron mines and cargo ships is a bomber that has been pulled away from their usual mission of pounding German industry and cities, and Bomber Command (which thinks it can win the war single-handedly by bombing German industry and cities, if they are just given the resources to do that) is going to resist that tooth and nail.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2020 18:33

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

This looks like a mad magazine fold in

It's from a 1973 National Lampoon article about "The Battling Buses of World War II".

# ¿ Dec 29, 2020 05:42

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

The really wild thing about the Falklands War was that the British were due to retire both carriers in less than a year (one sold to India, the other headed for the scrappers). If Argentina had waited for ten months, it's hard to see Britain mounting the kind of response they were able to.

Only slightly less wild was the behavior of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was the US ambassador to the UN and an important architect of Reagan's foreign policy. She had come to prominence with an article about how the US needs to back right-wing governments no matter how brutal, and she absolutely LOVED the Pinochet and Galtieri regimes - so much so that she tried to get the US to declare neutrality in the conflict, and even floated having Reagan activate a 1947 act about coming to the defense of South American countries against outside aggressors.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2020 19:34

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Hunt11 posted:

So how much traction did her initiatives get during the conflict?

Zero, and it greatly reduced her influence in the administration going forward. Still, it was a hell of a thing watching the UN ambassador of the US flying to Buenos Aires and saying that the US should remain neutral in this unfortunate situation, taking the side of fascist junta in a peripheral region against the US's #1 ally and the keystone of our Cold War posture in Europe.

Reagan's first term foreign policy appointees were quite a crew. Like the Secretary of State, Al Haig, who got on TV just after Reagan was rushed to the hospital following an assassination attempt to inform our allies and other nations that he was in charge - which came as something to a shock to Vice President George HW Bush.

FrangibleCover posted:

If Argentina waited ten months the Junta would be getting inverted tours of Buenos Aires petrol stations, they couldn't wait much longer than they did.

Yeah. The day of the invasion was also the day of a massive anti-regime protest in the capital - which spontaneously transformed into a pro-regime celebration once the news was announced that they'd reclaimed the islands from the hated British.

FMguru fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Dec 30, 2020

# ¿ Dec 30, 2020 20:14

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Mr Luxury Yacht posted:

Well for one Italy was getting dunked on for reasons other than having obsolete tanks so that's a good way to get a whole bunch of your fancy new tanks captured by the British.

Also Germany needed every tank they could get as it was so why waste it in Italy when it instead could be sent to the Afrika Corps or Eastern Front? It's not like they had piles of spare new tanks lying around. For the most part, when they did give their allies or puppets tanks they were largely obsolete ones or captured French vehicles.

In summary, Nazi Germany was, unsurprisingly, a lovely ally.

Yeah. Every German tank given to Italy is a German tank not fighting in the Soviet Union.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2021 06:06

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I've always thought Germany presented particular challenges in terms of foreign policy because of its location smack dab in the middle of Europe - it has no rear or peripheral areas to retreat into, it borders on everyone, and you're extremely vulnerable to being ganged up on (it's a real tough nation to play in Diplomacy). So to be successful, German foreign policy has to make sure that the country doesn't get ganged up on, and that means playing neighbors off against one another, keeping them divided, extracting small concessions for yourself over time, and making yourself indispensable to whatever conferences or treaties or arrangements are being negotiated around you. Bismarck was very very good at doing that, and he (and Germany) prospered by dividing his neighbors, isolating them, making countries afraid that if they didn't join you that you'd go and form an alliance with their enemies, and all the other things he did to slowly build Germany's influence (and surface area) without triggering a grand alliance to roll Germany back to its bare core territories. Unfortunately for Germany, he was fired and replaced by Kaiser Wilhelm, who managed to piss off and alarm pretty much all of his neighbors, and drove most of them into an alliance against him (I mean, you know you've hosed up when you've gotten Britain and France to set aside 600 years of hostility and formally ally), with catastrophic results.

Hitler's early war moves were very successful and very much in the Bismarckian mode - picking off countries and parts of countries one at a time (at the conference table as often as on the battlefield), being very minimal in his demands at any given time, and keeping the other great powers separated and unable to gang up on him (most notably, keeping the USSR from formally allying with the UK/France and cutting his own deal with them). But then he switched into Wilhelm mode and manged to pick a fight with all of his neighbors simultaneously, and that was his undoing.

It was always going to come crashing down on him - he could not be satisfied with the slow, opportunistic acquisition of small neighboring territories, his ideology demanded a whole continent of freshly-cleansed Lebensraum as quickly as possible - but for the pre-war and the first part of the war, Hitler had a lot of success following the Bismarckian strategy.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 22:21

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

fartknocker posted:

Out of curiosity, what would you say some of those few exceptions were?

Their storage can for water/gas (nicknamed the "Jerry Can" in the US/UK) was far superior to anything the allies had.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2021 21:34

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

The Lone Badger posted:

My understanding is that early japanese fighters were very good, the comparison mostly ends up looking bad because American planes improved an incredible amount and Japan just didn't have the engine tech (and good fuel) to match them.

Edit: that is to say, the early Japanese planes weren't technological wonders but they were very well matched to what they were being asked to do, making them more efficient at it than early-war anerican planes.

Japanese pilots also had a lot of actual combat experience (from China) that US pilots lacked and they were at the top of their game and knew how to use the A6M's strengths and cover its weaknesses in battle.

Once US pilots got some experience under their belts and figured out some effective tactics (Thach Weave, etc.), the scales began to even up.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2021 05:07

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Wingnut Ninja posted:

To bring it back around to history, I'm sure it's been covered in this thread before, but Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors has some amazingly brutal descriptions of just how much damage those ships took. poo poo like, the bridge is completely gone, the front half of the ship is on fire, the acting CO is the LTJG communication officer, and the aft turret is still blasting away at targets using its tertiary backup system.

Neptune's Inferno (about the USN at Guadalcanal, by the same author) also goes hard at communicating how Not Fun it was to be on a warship that is being hit with heavy fire, with particular emphasis on what all that flying metal does to the human beings crewing those warships.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2021 15:53

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

also the fact that most people think of metal as a thing that does not burn but in fact if you put enough paint, explosives, and other flammable materials on/around it, you get some extremely exciting fires

One thing that comes up over and over in NI is the aviation fuel storage for the various spotter/catapult/float planes carried by cruisers was almost entirely unprotected and tended to start burning uncontrollably once a ship started taking damage.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2021 16:06

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Cessna posted:

A Polish author named Bloch, for example, wrote a book entitled Is War Now Impossible? In it he predicted that modern weapons would lead to trench warfare, and that armies would launch futile attacks in which millions would die. The combatant nations would turn their economies to arms manufacture, which would lead to shortages, then revolutions.

But these were outliers. Most didn't predict the scope or scale of the war, let alone its outcome.

Norman Angell wrote a widely-celebrated book (The Great Illusion) arguing that industrial-scale war between major powers would be so destructive and so costly that war was now literally unthinkable and permanent peace was now at hand. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for that and his other peace-promoting efforts.

The book was published in 1910.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2021 21:29

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

TK-42-1 posted:

To this day i�m still flabbergasted that Kissinger is still alive, not in jail, and revered as a statesman by some people.

"He never sleeps, he says. He says he�ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

# ¿ May 6, 2021 22:14

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

There's a fair amount of literature on Why Military Organizations Make Dumb Mistakes.

# ¿ May 10, 2021 22:25

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Incrementalism
Soviets in Afghanistan, US in Vietnam, Allied participation in the Russian revolution, Greek part of Turkish war of independence, Napoleon in Spain etc. You start off with relatively limited objectives and a controlled scope and as soon as you get on the ground things start to spiral. In order to preserve the attainment of your limited objectives, you have to commit more and more forces, expanding the scope of the conflict. As you commit more resources across a larger scope, withdrawal becomes more difficult, and you have to commit progressively more and more forces, with a progressive expansion of scope, until you're fighting a full on war.

Also known as "Mission Creep" and "Conflating Means And Ends". The Sunk Cost Principle is usually at play here, too.

There's also been a lot of work about how bureaucratic politics and organizational imperatives drive state decisionmaking. You really can't understand Japan's behavior in 1937-1941 without understanding the way the Army and the Navy clashed over things in ways that made a coherent, "rational" foreign policy impossible, for instance.

# ¿ May 10, 2021 23:21

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

PittTheElder posted:

Speaking of Technowar, has anybody read The Irony of Vietnam? I've had it sitting on my table forever, written by the guy in charge of the department that wrote the Pentagon Papers, all about how American leaders knew basically exactly what they were doing and the political machinations that caused them to continue the largely counterproductive war they did not expect to win.

I read it, it's excellent (although about 40 years old at this point). It was written to refute a common belief at the time, that the reason our leaders kept fighting an unwinnable war was because they were systematically fed overly optimistic reports from the DoD and CIA. In reality, the president and the NSC had a very clear understanding of the actual situation, and there were other reasons that they kept the war rolling along - it was easier to keep the war going, kick the can into the future, and hope that something broke their way than to pay the domestic and international price of walking away from such a high-profile commitment (LBJ in particular feared another round of McCarthyism and "who lost China?" that would completely unravel his Great Society domestic agenda). So they continued to kick the can down the road, running up tens of thousands of additional US (and millions of Vietnamese) casualties, only to have it all blow up in the US's face anyway. Great work, good job everyone.

Any resemblance to our policy in AfPak for the last dozen years or so is entirely coincidental, I'm sure.

# ¿ May 11, 2021 23:00

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

What's the current "Napoleon for Dummies" reference out there

# ¿ May 20, 2021 22:15

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

A history professor at Syracuse posted a twitter thread following along with his efforts to read Gladwell's book on strategic bombing:

https://twitter.com/Alan_Allport/status/1395770118785966086

It goes about as well as you would imagine.

# ¿ May 24, 2021 00:34

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Panzeh posted:

Gladwell is very much a take guy who got adopted in elite circles because his facile ideas appealed to them so now he's pretty much set for life.

I always think of him as a guy who writes self-help books for people who think they're too sophisticated to be caught reading self-help books.

# ¿ May 24, 2021 14:43

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Quartered Safe was a great read, but the digressions into Empire Nostalgia were really jarring. I remember a multi-paragraph rant about how the conversion to decimal currency was a betrayal of all that his squadmates had fought for.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2021 18:40

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Arsenic Lupin posted:

I read a lot of novels set in the Napoleonic period. Does there exist any entry-level book about the Napoleonic wars? I can't read a cavalry vs. infantry diagram, I don't know which sorts of breastworks are most effective, and I have to look up 'enfilade' every time it's used. I need a book that is accessible to people who aren't war buffs. Pictures would be nice.

Mark Adkin wrote a companion book to the Sharpe novels (called, naturally enough, The Sharpe Companion) which explained a lot of what was going on (militarily) in those books.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2021 01:07

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Cyrano4747 posted:

That's the Battle of Hougoumont. You'll also see it called an "action" a "defense" etc. The tl;dr is that it was the focal point of the attacks on the British right flank. It was a chateau that wellington used to anchor that side of his line by basically turning it into a little fort. You couldn't attack the center without taking fire from the chateau, and assaulting the chateau would be a loving chore.

In the end, the French assaulted it with the idea of drawing Wellington's reinforcements there and then hitting his left flank. It was a grinding bloodbath for most of the day, including poo poo like French assault teams breaching the walls wielding axes, the british locking the door behind them, and then being exterminated in brutal hand to hand fighting. Reading accounts of it sounds more like something out of Verdun than anything else.

It's pretty remarkable that a campaign for control of Europe, and a battle with around 250,000 troops, very much boiled down to hand-to-hand fighting inside of a single building.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2021 20:13

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Scratch Monkey posted:

I imagine Khrushchev was convinced that he could push around a young and inexperienced American president and score a significant victory on the international stage. He's move missiles into Cuba, bluster at Kennedy until he backed down, and he would bask in the glory until everyone forget about it and the missiles became just a thing everyone lived with.

My vague recollection was that there had been Kennedy-Khrushchev summit the year before that had been something of a disaster for the Americans, with Kennedy underprepared (and flying high on goofballs) and giving the Soviets the impression that he was way out of his depths and could be easily rolled.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2021 17:20

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

heated shot is for fires not explosions, usually with the explosion being a secondary result of the fire you have set

heating shot on board a ship or boat in the appropriate era is difficult for all the obvious reasons. well, heating the shot is comparatively easy. not setting your own ship on fire is the hard part.

IIRC, heated shot was mostly used by forts firing at ships. In the Horatio Hornblower stories, they always knew when they were spotted because the smokestacks on the forts would start chugging.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2021 23:37

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Cessna posted:

A lot of this sort of thing isn't covered in accounts because the authors assume that their audience - other contemporary military types - will already know.

I remember one prof pointing out that at no point in Caesar's Gallic Wars does he mention the fact that his troops wore armor, let alone describe that armor. Because, well, everyone reading would have seen a Roman soldier and know what they wore. Similarly, an account of war today probably won't specifically mention that troops wear boots.

I've seen the same point made about Le Morte d'Arthur - Malory never describes the armor or the castles or even what people looked like, because the audience knew what armor and castles were and what all these famous folk-characters looked like.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2021 18:37

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

There is also the way that troops-on-the-ground are often some of the worst people to opine usefully on an opponent's gear - they're myopically focused on what is in front of them (and shooting at them) and don't see the weaknesses that exist in other areas (production, supply, training, maintenance, etc.)

If all you have to go on is the time you faced off against a Tiger, then you're probably going to be very impressed with it. But your very vivid impression doesn't take into account the extra resources and time it took to build it, or the difficulty it had just driving into the battle zone with out breaking down or shredding its transmission. Wargaming sand-table stats about armor thickness and muzzle velocity aren't the whole story, or even the most important parts of the story.

Plus, I suspect bitching about your equipment and the cheap stupid so-and-sos who issued it to you has been something soliders have been doing nonstop since at least the battle of Kadesh.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2021 22:31

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I've often wondered if the US's late/slow emergence from the Depression (relative to other countries) led to Japan and Germany underestimating the size and potential of the US wartime economy.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2021 18:20

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Cessna posted:

Drink more vodka, it will help.

This, but in a more general and widely-applicable sense.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 18:11

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

"Why does Goering, the largest Nazi, not simply eat the other Nazis?"

# ¿ Aug 24, 2021 16:12

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Cessna posted:

There was a whole thing in East Germany in the 60's and 70's where they built little tanks for kids Pioneer clubs, presumably so they could have fun and practice tactics.

Kinderpanzer:

Its like a more menacing version of the Shriners

# ¿ Aug 24, 2021 19:11

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Cyrano4747 posted:

They were members of a specially trained squadron flying specially modified aircraft and had instructions about poo poo like how to climb and turn away ASAP to avoid the thermal effects etc. I don't have a source off the top of my head but I know I've read accounts of the bombing range they used to practice that.

I know Paul Tibbets wrote at least one book ,that's probably a place to start.

The recent Hornfischer book on the last year of the Pacific War (The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945) went into quite a lot of detail about Tibbets, the 509th Composite Group, training for the a-bomb drops, the secrecy surrounding that training, the suspicion everyone else on Tinian had towards that unit, and the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I had not realized, until I read the book, what an incredible series of near-disasters the Nagasaki mission was). Seems like a good place to start.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2021 06:47

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Comstar posted:

Please go into more detail about the near-disasters.

From memory:
- Concerns about building storms forced the mission to be moved up several days, necessitating a rush for exhausted crews to finish assembling the bomb and prep the aircraft
- The day before the mission, Tibbets decides to turn it over to his understudy, for reasons that still aren't clear.
- The day of the mission, it is discovered that one of the fuel pumps is dead. Replacing it would take too much time and force the mission to be cancelled, so the plane took off with several hundred gallons of fuel that it literally could not use
- Once airborne, it was discovered that the bomb had been prepped incorrectly, and the safety plugs were in the wrong place, and the bomb appeared to arm itself, which sent the weapon crew scrambling through the blueprints to figure out what was going on (a couple of relays had been installed backwards, generating a false red light). They fix it, but still.
- They spent 45 minutes burning precious fuel loitering around the rendezvous point to meet the rest of their squadron (scout planes, observation planes) some of which never showed up (there was some confusion about what altitude to meet up at). They go on regardless.
- During the planes' search for each other, one of them sent a coded signal that was misinterpreted as "Bockscar down". This caused some distress back on Tinian. Oops.
- The first target (Kokura) was completely fogged in, so they had to proceed to their secondary target (Nagasaki). More fuel burned. Also, the planes got pelted with flak and were buzzed by interceptors.
- Nagasaki was almost completely fogged in, too. They circled the city looking for a break in the clouds so they could aim the bomb properly. Again, more fuel burned. They begin to worry about what to do if they have to scrub and fly a billion-dollar, armed experimental nuclear warhead (which has already shown itself to be temperamental) back to base.
- Finally, through a "miraculous" break in the clouds, they spot the city and drop the bomb. (It is almost certainly the case that there was no break in the clouds and the crew just dropped it based on radar readings and hoped for the best). They miss their target by almost a mile.
- Almost out of fuel, they had to make an emergency landing at Okinawa. For some reason the tower wouldn't respond to their radio. So the plane running on fumes fired all the flares they had out the side ports and basically crash-landed on the runway there, landing too fast, bouncing 25 feet in the air, and almost slamming into a line of fully fueled and armed B-24s. The general in charge of the base (an obscure aviator named James Doolittle) comes running out, demanding to know what the gently caress that was all about. He's stunned to learn it's the Bockscar, a plane that had been reported lost earlier in the day.

Just an amazing collection of near-disasters. It was so weird because the previous mission (Hiroshima) had gone exactly according to plan, like clockwork, 100% by the book. This flight was snakebit at every level.

Poking around, I found this article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ( https://thebulletin.org/2015/08/the-harrowing-story-of-the-nagasaki-bombing-mission/ ) with additional details, like how the plutonium pit for Fat Man got transported from the US to Tinian.

quote:

The heart of Fat Man was a grapefruit-sized core of plutonium�a newly manufactured, radioactive element that is more stable than most isotopes of uranium and more powerful. It was shiny, slightly warm, and weighed about 14.1 pounds. And someone had to carry it to the tiny Pacific Island of Tinian, where the bomb would be assembled and loaded on to a B-29 bomber...As described in his diary, Schreiber sat on a hard wooden chair strapped inside the big plane all the way to Tinian. Like everyone working on the Bomb, he was exhausted. So he slept sitting up, sometimes holding the bomb case in his lap. At one point, over the Pacific, he went up to the cockpit to get a better view of what was causing turbulence. One of the crew came up behind and tapped him on the shoulder: �Whatever that thing is you got, it�s rolling around the back of the plane. Maybe you want to corral it.�

Yeah, maybe.

FMguru fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Sep 1, 2021

# ¿ Sep 1, 2021 06:19

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

SubG posted:

...and then you get to the chapter where Feynman goes into detail about how the right way to pick up women is to disrespect them.

Wikipedia, on his Cornell years:

quote:

By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile".[108] He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends.[109]

Whatta swell guy.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2021 01:50

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

There's also the domestic situation, especially the fallout of McCarthyism. Someone at State arguing for a nuanced and differentiated approach to negotiating with communist nations will be explaining his thinking to HUAC in front of TV cameras, so it's no wonder people who thought that were inclined to keep their heads down and go with the flow.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2021 18:08

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Nenonen posted:

Traditions of the Red Fleet were vodka, sodomy and the knout.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2021 20:17

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

As a strategy for winning bureaucratic bunfights, "Trying to derail a ridiculous proposal by pushing an even more ridiculous one" is a reasonably credible one, but oooh there's a really spectacular potential downside risk...

# ¿ Sep 10, 2021 21:20

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 14:32

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Supposedly, many chess games were played over the Kremlin-White House hotline phone (that was installed after the Cuban Missile Crisis) during the weekly tests of the system.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2021 14:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: pusillanimous tohubohu

«‹›3 »