Comments by "Evan" (@MrEvanfriend) on "Metatron" channel.

stoffel American beer has gotten quite good over the last 20 years or so. We now have something like 4000 breweries across the country brewing every style of beer imaginable. Homebrewing is a growing hobby as well.
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Nazdreg1 I've had a beer in Ireland once. On my way back from Iraq, we stopped at the Shannon airport. I had a Beamish Red. I hadn't had a beer in seven months, and so it was the best beer I'd ever had. Objectively though, Irish beer isn't that great. I much prefer Belgian, English, and German beer.
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Jonathan Banchetti Beer is better than wine though, and good beer is gonna be expensive anywhere. I've spent over $30 on a bottle of beer a number of times.
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Piroclanidis Nobody cares about kids in Africa. If you do care about kids in Africa, you're wrong.
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+Bart Van Riel Homebrewer or professional? I just brewed a saison today
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Bart Van Riel Oh ok. I got into home brewing about a year ago, and I quite enjoy it.
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TadRaunch Tastes like it too. Baltika is pretty awful.
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TadRaunch That isn't something to brag about. I like a drink as much as anyone, but I either make my own or buy the good stuff.
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I could kill a knight quite easily. A guy on a horse wearing shiny stuff and bright colors makes a rather easy target. And remember, the fully armored knight faded from history with the invention and improvement of gunpowder weapons. With modern autoloading rifles, spitzer bullets, and smokeless powders, it wouldn't be much of a contest.
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He is quite often wrong when he attempts to talk about modern military stuff, and especially guns, which he is almost always wrong about.
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I spent a year and a half in Okinawa, and my Japanese was limited to my phone number, a few pleasantries, and a few swear words/insults. I spent seven months in Iraq, and I could at least carry on a conversation in broken Arabic (though a rifle sure helps when you're trying to make yourself understood). I speak a little German, not as much as I used to, because I never get a chance to use it, and I've taught myself to read Russian, but the only words I know are profanity and whatever I can figure out from similarity to words in English or some other language I have whatever minor familiarity with.
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Post offices are as fucked up as a football bat practically everywhere. In the US, when you move, the post office is where you go to get a voter registration form. When I moved to Queens, I got mine in Chinese, which I don't read, nor am I even remotely mistakable for a chinaman. That post office also just stopped delivering my mail for about six months for no good reason. In Philadelphia, I once went to the post office to get a stamp and an envelope to mail off a check or something. After spending 30 seconds looking at one sheet of stamps, and another minute or so looking at a separate sheet of stamps, and comparing the two (which were identical), the postal worker informed me that they didn't sell stamps. They also lost a camera full of pictures from Iraq, which I had mailed to my girlfriend to get the pictures developed. It never got there.
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Cocking/taking the safety off of Glocks. That's one of my favorites. Ridiculous flamethrower muzzle blasts. Pistol hits throwing people across rooms. Suppressors going onto non-threaded barrels - including revolvers.
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No, no, no, no no! NEVER shoot for the legs, you always aim center mass. You have no business shooting at anyone you aren't willing to kill in the first place, and a shot to the chest is FAR more likely to stop the fight, and is an easier target to hit. Aim center mass, this is what every organization in the world that trains people to use firearms in combat or self-defense will tell you.
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Naval personnel are sailors, not soldiers. And the word "corps" is pronounced as "core", the ps at the end is silent. That being said, having to wear your uniform while on liberty must suck. And a 10PM curfew also sounds horrid. In the US military, once you secure for the day, you can put on civilian attire and do basically whatever you want (within some basic limits) so long as you're back by formation the next morning.
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***** I can't speak for the Italian military, but the English word "soldier" does not apply to naval sailors.
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***** But since it doesn't work in English, use of the English word "soldier" is incorrect. I don't speak Italian and as such can't tell you what the Italian words are, but, if you're gonna speak English, the proper word to use for naval personnel is "sailor".
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***** It's incorrect. A soldier in a navy implies naval infantry, like the US/Royal Marines. Naval personnel are sailors.
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***** It does matter, and I would imagine that as a non-native English speaker, he would welcome the correction. When I say something wrong in my imperfect German or my horrendous Russian, I welcome corrections.
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***** As a former US Marine, I prefer the title that I earned, but I don't mind being referred to as a soldier when it comes down to it, as I was engaged in ground combat. I don't care what Thelonius has to say, or what the correct term in Italian is, the fact remains that in English, a sailor and a soldier are two different things, and to call a sailor a soldier is every bit as incorrect as calling a soldier a sailor.
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***** It is a fact. A navy is not an army. Naval personnel are sailors, army personnel are soldiers.
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***** I understand the origins of the word, however, the language has evolved to the point where soldier and sailor mean different things. You wouldn't call a soldier a sailor, and by the same token, you wouldn't call a sailor a soldier.
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Get a haircut.
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Celtic Noble Ever been in a fight? The formal moves tend to go out the window, and there's a lot of swinging.
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Celtic Noble What makes you say that? The concept makes perfect sense, but that doesn't change the fact that actual fights don't look like Bruce Lee movies.
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You can't really talk about American pizza. There's too much difference. You have that nasty Pizza Hut shit that's prevalent in most of the country, then the Chicago style deep dish, which is also weird and wrong, and then you have New York pizza, which can essentially be divided into Neopolitan (thin and round) and Sicilian (thick and square). New York pizza is the only one that's any good, and it can be hard to find outside of the Greater New York area (though I have found decent examples in Pennsylvania and in North Carolina). That being said, you may think you want to visit New York, but you don't. I grew up there, and have spent over half my life there, and I refuse to go there anymore. It's an absolutely disgusting city in every way. The pizza and the New York Mets are really the only worthwhile things in the entire city. And Gray's Papaya, which are the world's best hot dogs, hands down.
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As far as faith as a battlefield attribute goes, the people I fought in Iraq were fighting for nothing other than their demonic god and false prophet. Their faith didn't help them much.
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Not only is the physical strength difference important, and the fact mentioned by others that men are far more expendable than women, but there's another factor as well: Testosterone, the male sex hormone, causes aggression - which is a useful thing for a fight. Men are naturally more prone to and capable of violence. Going into a fight, you want larger, stronger, and meaner people to do your fighting. In every case, this means men.
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The money one is done in America as well.
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I don't get why those two jousting helmets were even there. Nothing particularly spectacular about them.
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Isn't it primus pilus, with the masculine "us" ending as opposed to the neuter "um"?
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You make valid points, but the big picture here is that virtually any English speaker - at least a native English speaker - can tell an American from a Briton. And with mass media, accents are becoming more generic. In the Marine Corps, I knew Utahns, Texans, and Floridians. Most of them spoke with a general non-regional American accent. Myself, I am a native of New York, but my mother is from Tennessee. To my own ear, my accent sounds very generic American. In the Corps, I found that some people thought I had a thick New York accent - which was occasionally mistaken for a Boston accent (I sound nothing like a Bostonian). When I left the Marines and moved back to New York, people thought I had a southern accent. In Pennsylvania, where I live now, nobody notices any particular accent of mine - though I plainly don't speak with the Pennsylvania accent where "home" is pronounced "h'yome" and "water" is pronounced "wudder". Nobody hearing me speak has ever thought I was anything but American, except for one German guy who I had a brief conversation in German with at a bar in Queens, NY, who thought I was German mostly because I had ordered a beer that apparently isn't well known outside of Bamberg. Certainly nobody has ever mistaken me for an Englishman.
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Even in modern armies, women are horribly unsuited for combat. It's not just a matter of shooting a rifle (though a Marine Corps study said that men were about 50% better at that as well). A modern soldier carries quite a bit of armor, weapons, ammunition, and other equipment. Something like 60-80lbs. That shit gets heavy. A man can generally carry up to half of his body weight in gear for an extended period without hurting himself. For women, it's 25% of body weight, any more than that and they become increasingly likely to suffer injuries. Furthermore, the very basic issue that makes men far better suited to combat - testosterone - remains. Women are simply not capable of the levels of strength and aggression, two very necessary attributes for a successful soldier, that men are. Sure, the majority of modern armies consist of support roles, and sure, women make fine administrators and logisticians. I don't think anyone contests that (though there is the effect of women integrated into units that is troublesome even there - prostitution, STDs, pregnancies, real and imagined sexual assaults, and the general discord that comes from having a very small female minority amongst a large number of young, undersexed men), but support troops are not combat troops, and the dichotomy there is very real. A woman who might be excellent at making sure I get paid, probably far better at it than I could ever be, would not be able to keep up kicking down doors. Case in point: When the Obama administration made its disastrous attempt to integrate women into combat units, 36 women went to the Marine Corps' School of Infantry at Camp Lejeune. Three passed. I had not previously heard of ANYONE failing SOI.
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Is there any evidence of legionaries wearing any type of armor on their right arm? Because based on what I know about Roman legionary combat, it seems to me like the right arm is really the only bit of the body that spends any significant time not behind a shield, and as such, seems very vulnerable without any armor at all.
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Metatron How widespread was this?
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When I was about eleven years old, my mother had a family friend, a retired Latin professor, attempt to teach me Latin. At the time, I had zero interest, and spent these lessons making up my own "Latin" words like "crotus" and "bortobullus" and similar nonsense. Twenty years later, I really regret gaffing this opportunity off. The man who was attempting to teach me died in 1999, and basically all I remember was that V is pronounced as W, as in "EVANVS, (you have a) VACVVM MENTE". As an adult, I know a very few phrases/prayers in Latin, my favorite being BENEDICTVS DOMINVS DEVS MEVS QVI DOCET MANVS MEVS AD PRAELIVM ET DIGITOS MEVS AD BELLVM. Hindsight being 20/20, I would have payed attention, but at the time I just wanted to fool around with my friends. Right now, I can't remember a single name of the kids I gaffed off Latin to go play with. What a waste.
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Legionaries would lose all of these. They were soldiers who were trained to fight as a unit, and their training and equipment was not geared towards one on one combat. So yeah, one on one, the legionary would be likely to lose against most other historical warriors. For these who can beat who things, you'd need units. A century against a Viking raid? Interesting. A duel? Not so much.
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I imagine that the gladius was better against armored opponents than a spear would for one simple reason - it can be aimed with more precision. Fighting an opponent in some form of mail armor, I'd rather be able to close with him behind the shield wall and aim at the gaps in his armor with a short sword than try to hit him with a spear from six feet (more or less two meters) out. With the gladius you can it an unarmored arm, leg, or neck far better than you could with a spear, for the simple fact that it's shorter. Therefore my conclusion is essentially the opposite of yours - that the gladius was more effective against armored opponents than a spear is, for the simple reason that you can use it more precisely. Against unarmored opponents, there is no need to use a short sword when any strike will kill/disable your enemy at a longer distance. Against an armored opponent, a spear may be deflected, whereas a thrust from a short sword at face-to-face distance can be stuck in an armpit or a thigh or a neck or some other uncovered body part.
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I thought that the source of Caligula's nickname was common knowledge. Apparently, he was not particularly fond of this nickname as an adult. And I can't really blame him either. If I was the most powerful man in the world, I wouldn't want to go by "Bootsie" or anything like that, it isn't exactly dignified. And caligae were indeed sandals. A sandal is "A light shoe with either an openwork upper or straps attaching the sole to the foot." The thick soles and high ankles of caligae don't foreclose any part of that definition. They may be boot sandals or military sandals or what have you, but they are sandals. Ox and cow are both cattle - they're the same species, the difference is what they're used for. Thus ox leather and cow leather are the exact same thing. Infantry is infantry. If you live on your feet, you learn the importance of taking care of them. That means if your boots are worn out, it's time to get a new pair. This is true whether you're a legionary or a lance corporal, whether your TO weapon is a gladius or an M27 IAR, whether those boots are caligae or Danners.
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The word Corps in English is pronounced as "core", not as "corpse". Your English is incredibly good, if accented, but as a former member of the United States Marine Corps, that mispronunciation really gets at me. Then again, my Italian is limited to "capo di cazzo" and various other New York Sicilianisms that I can't even imagine how they're spelled (all profane of course), so I guess I'm not in much of a position to speak on the topic.
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Modern British soldiers are still forced to fight right-handed. This is because the L85/L86 rifle/light machine gun are not usable by lefties. And I don't know this for a fact, but I imagine that in the age of bolt action rifles, many if not most armies forced their soldiers to fight right handed. This is because as a lefty myself, I find that manipulating the bolt on bolt action rifles is far harder than it is for right handers. I personally own a Lee-Enfield No. III, and I find that left handed, I cannot come anywhere close to replicating the famous "mad minute", as the time it takes me to cycle the bolt with my left hand is far longer, and involves far more movement than it does for a right handed person. In the age of flintlock muskets, soldiers were forced to fight right handed as well, because the flash in the pan of a flintlock can take out a lefty's eye. The fact is that about 85% of the human population is right handed, and weapons and tactics tend to be designed for that 85%, with lefties either relegated to an afterthought or not thought of at all. I'm sure this has led to countless examples of right hand specific weapons and combat tactics, that lefties had to learn to adjust to.
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War is often just. It all depends on the cause. In WWII, for instance, the United States were never under serious direct threat from either Germany or Japan. However, I do not think it can be reasonably argued that the Marine on Guadalcanal battling the Japanese, malaria, malnutrition, and the generally horrible circumstances on that island were unjust in what they were doing. Nor can the soldier freezing in the Bois Jaques, holding the line against a vastly superior German force. Their cause was just, and therefore their actions were. When I was 19, I went to war in Iraq, a war that was unpopular then and is even more so now. I remain convinced that my fight was a just one. While the experience was one I'm glad to have behind me, I am very glad that I fought Islam on the streets of Fallujah rather than the streets of Philadelphia. There are men and ideologies that need to be stopped, and words do not always work to stop them. When that is the case, the mailed fist is the only option, and it is a righteous one. This is why the warrior is revered. Because war is truly the highest calling of man, as horrible as it is for the warrior himself. That a man is willing to put himself through hell to attain a result that he may well not live to see is everything that should be honored. This is not to say that war, just or not, does not have innocent victims. The tens of thousands of civilians who died in the respective firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo were, for the most part, decent people who had the bad luck of being from the wrong place, and they suffered and died for it. As cruel as it sounds, their deaths were worth it. The Third Reich and the Empire of Japan needed to be stopped at all costs, and if immolating tens of thousands of their people was what it took to batter these regimes to their knees, then so be it. In many situations, someone ends up on the short end of the stick, this is unavoidable. And in some situations, such as war, this can be for the greater good. 100,000 Tokyo civilians is a small price to pay for the billions of people today who live without the Imperial Japanese boot on their necks.
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There is FAR more wrong with that retarded show than just the costumes and armor. First, they can't even get the names of the primary characters right. Ragnar LODBROK (not "Lothbrok") is a well known probably mythical figure. Gangahrolf, or Hrolf the Walker, had his name Latinized as Rollo, but certainly didn't call himself that. Second, they're putting 8th-9th century Scandinavians in a feudal system. No, not at all. And to make it worse, you become Jarl by killing the old Jarl, which is the way that no feudal system ever has worked. Then there's the claim that before Lindisfarne, the Norse had no idea that the British Isles existed. Again, no. Then, they have executed people going to Valhalla, when Valhalla was only for those slain in battle, and not even all of them. Then, they add to the historical confusion and popular false imagine of women being on raids. Again, THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN FOR ANY NUMBER OF BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL REASONS. I can't emphasize that strongly enough. Then you have the main character with the ridiculous haircut whose name they couldn't even be bothered to get right treating his slaves as equals, because a modern audience generally tends to be against slavery, so they feel the need to soften that reality to appeal to them. No, slaves were not treated as equals there or anywhere else. And this was all just from the first half of the first season, after which I was too disgusted to keep watching, since they'd already gotten basically everything wrong. Also, Ragnar Lodbrok was probably mythical, but even so he is in no way connected with the Lindisfarne raid, or, for that matter, with Hrolf the Walker. Basically, the only thing that show did a decent job on was the ships. They look good. Everything else is pretty much terrible. They should have just gone ahead and put them in the horned helmets, because the lack of horned helmets seems to be the only concession to authenticity that they made.
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Who the hell still calls it Bohemia? And I believe Bohemia is just a region within the Czech Republic and not the whole country, but I don't know enough about the place to be sure.
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Hearing those two passages, it's somewhat understandable how Rome ruled the world while modern day Italy is kind of a third rate power whose politics can be somewhat of an international laughingstock (no offense to Italians).
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Latin is used for Mass, not for Liturgy. While the differences may seem mainly semantic, they did manage to cause a rift between the Western and Eastern Churches that has lasted for over a millenium. We Catholics (I'm assuming you're Catholic because you're Italian) hear Mass , which used to be in Latin but has been in vernacular my whole life; in Greece or Russia or the few left alive in Egypt or Syria hear the Liturgy in their vernacular. The differences between Western and Eastern Christianity are actually quite interesting. They all seem incredibly minor to the layman, but the consequences of these differences shaped history. And half of them seem to be over the Latin word "FILIOQVE"
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Knight wins, no doubt. The Roman Legions were effective because the legionaries fought as a unit, they weren't trained for individual combat, whereas knights were trained specifically for that. The legionary would be out of his element, regardless of the weapons the knight used.
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