Youtube comments of Evan (@MrEvanfriend).
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Soldiers being clean shaven is a very modern phenomenon, stemming from the First World War. At the beginning of the war, the British Army required soldiers to wear a mustache. However, the war completely upset the military paradigm in a number of ways - including facial hair. And the reason for that is simple, and practical: facial hair, specifically beards, sideburns, or handlebar type mustaches, interfere with the seal on a gas mask. If you have a beard, your gas mask will not form a proper seal to your face, and will not afford you much protection.
Of course, from that practical origin, it's gotten stupid, and become little more than an excuse for senior enlisted to pester the troops. And there's a reason that virtually every veteran I know, myself included, wears a beard.
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@mrspeigle1 At least not a politician who hasn't been dead for at least 50 years. I don't mind USS George Washington or USS Abraham Lincoln, but USS Gabby Giffords is absolutely obscene, and so many of these other ones just reek of cronyism - Senator so-and-so introduced a bill giving a hefty budget increase to the Navy, so he gets a ship kind of nonsense. If they've been dead 50 years, nobody will remember how they voted on the "Buy the Navy Cool New Toys Act", and they won't get a ship.
In general, I'm against naming ships after people who aren't (1) Medal of Honor recipients from the Navy or Marine Corps, (2) important and non-partisanly popular people in American history - Ben Franklin rates a ship, Cesar Chavez does not, (3) influential Navy officers - I have no problem with Chester Nimitz having a ship named for him.
An exception can also be made for presidents who served in the Navy. USS Jimmy Carter is an appropriate name for a submarine - Carter was a submariner, and USS George H.W. Bush is an appropriate name for a carrier, as Bush was a Naval aviator.
I also don't like the place names for ships.
The British names are awesome, as far as I know, only the USS Intrepid has been given a truly solid name by the US Navy.
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When I was in the Marines, the Australian Army came to train on Abrams tanks at Twentynine Palms, where I was stationed. I got to know a few of those guys pretty well, and like all allied soldiers do, we traded a fair bit of uniform items - a set of my MARPAT cammies for an Aussie "jellybean suit", my eight point "soft cover" for one of their berets (still my drinking hat 14 years later), stuff like that. I wanted the slouch hat - since they were cavalry, they had the emu plume on theirs which made it look even cooler. I offered all kinds of stuff for one of those, but they wouldn't take anything less than my dress blue jacket. That's like a $200+ jacket (I don't remember the exact price), and the best uniform item in the world. Alas, I was unable to complete a trade for the slouch hat. It's a major regret of mine, because those are amazing hats.
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Air Em Out Virtually all scholars agree that Jesus did exist, and that he was baptised by John the Baptist and then crucified. This is history, not theology. Whether or not you believe that Jesus was the son of God or not, his life happened, and was one of if not the most influential event in human history. This is really indisputable. Jesus changed the world whether you like it or not, therefore BC/AD is a sensible distiction. BCE/CE is not a sensible distiction, it's entirely arbitrary. If not for Jesus Christ, what else happened during the middle of the reign of Augustus to be worth Year One? The BCE/CE thing is nothing more than political correctness for its own sake. The entire world, Christian or not, has agreed upon the BC/AD distinction, and pretending it doesn't exist because you aren't Christian is simply foolish.
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@SonsOfLorgar The companies who make these things have legal teams. And those legal teams' job is to protect the company from liability. It usually isn't that someone actually did the stupid thing that it warns you not to do, it's mostly the lawyers anticipating what some idiot could do.
In America, we don't regulate everything to death. It's tyrannical and costly to do so. Instead, we have tort law. Basically, if you make an unsafe product and someone gets hurt or killed using it, you can be sued for substantial amounts of money. These companies, for obvious reasons, try to avoid being sued for substantial amounts of money. And that's where the warning labels come in. If some idiot puts their kid in the microwave and then sues, the company's lawyers will be able to show the court that they specifically warned not to do that - and hence the idiot killed his kid through no fault of the manufacturer, but through his own negligence in failure to heed a warning and in using their product for a purpose not intended.
It can get ridiculous at times, but it beats government regulation.
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Do you mean the 2nd Marines specifically or do you just mean the 2nd Marine Division?
When you say "Second Marines", it refers to the 2nd Marine Regiment, which is a subordinate unit of the 2nd Marine Division, but not the same thing as the Division itself (my battalion belonged to the Seventh Marines, which is part of the First Marine Division, for example).
The patch for the 2nd MarDiv is a red arrowhead shaped thing with a hand holding a yellow torch with a red 2 on it, and the Southern Cross in yellow stars in the background. I believe that at one point, the patch had GUADALCANAL on it, like 1st MarDiv's patch still does. Interestingly enough, Marines do not wear division patches on any of our uniforms, and have not for some time (though we did in WWII). However, Army personnel who were attached to Marine units or were prior service Marines can and do wear Marine Corps patches. My friend from the Corps who later joined the Army wore a 1st MarDiv combat patch.
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Laynie Fingers I think that the extreme patriotism, being absolutely certain that Japan could never lose, was a large part of the brainwashing. If you read Hiroo Onoda's book No Surrender, he talks about the mental gymnastics he goes through, things about the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" or something to that effect, and rather specific ideas about what was going on in the war. As far as the isolation goes, it certainly didn't help the situation, but after being bombarded with leaflets explaining what had happened, including ones signed by Japanese generals, and not seeing any American troops, only Filipino farmers and occasionally Filipino police, he ought to have figured it out. Unfortunately for him, his team, and a number of locals who they killed, the brainwashing overcame any and all reason. I have nothing but respect for the man, he was hard as nails to survive as he did for 29 years, but Japanese propaganda and robotic obedience to orders took the place of reason, and he wasted three decades of his life because of it.
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Air Em Out Literally none of that is true, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself for thinking so. First, Jesus and his disciples were Jews. Contemporary historians like Tacitus and Josephus, a Roman and Jew respectively, agree on this. Even the name "Jesus" is a Greek adaptation of the Hebrew Joshua. So no, it wasn't a Roman invention. It was a Jewish invention that spread to Greece and caught on in Rome despite heavy persecution. Try reading some actual history instead of whatever dreck it is you get this nonsense from.
By the way, you'll notice I'm not opining on any of the theological ramifications of Jesus' life. Whether or not he was the Son of God isn't particularly relevant to the more or less concrete historical fact that he existed. Just because you have some arbitrary hatred of Christianity is not good enough reason to say there was no Christ. I, for one, virulently hate Islam and all the paynim savages who practice it (unlike you, my hatred is based in experience and reality), but this doesn't mean I deny the existence of Black Mahound. I just don't believe he was anything more than a genocidal pederast with a knack for bad poetry. Claiming that Jesus didn't exist because you don't like Christians is the same as being a Holocaust denier because you don't like Jews. It's willful stupidity.
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Well, I saw a few episodes of Vikings, and I thought it insulted my intelligence. The ridiculous costumes, the inability to get basic names right, the feudalism in 9th century Scandinavia, the women raiders, those "priests" (and their dealings with the Norse pagan religion in general), the notion that they were unaware of England...all complete nonsense. It's a real shame too, I was looking forward to it, I figured the History Channel would at least make some attempt to treat the subject with historical accuracy. By the third episode, I found myself wishing that they'd just go all out and put them all in horned helmets.
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@BaconheartStuff You assume mostly incorrectly.
In the US military (at least the Marine Corps, but I assume the other services as well), units get an allotted amount of ammunition per fiscal year. If that ammunition isn't used up, they get a smaller allotment next year. So the way it works is that ammo that doesn't get used in training just gets dumped off the trucks in the field. Now, ammo isn't cheap, and this dumped ammo is an excellent source of free ammo if you own guns in the proper calibers, as I did and do. I'd always come back from the field with a ton of ammo, which I'd then go shoot out of my own guns on my own time. Nobody cared. I didn't bother hiding that I was taking ammo I'd find in the field, and not once did anyone suggest that I shouldn't do it. So I'd often come back with a few hundred rounds in my pack, and it was a win-win situation - whoever dumped it in the first place got rid of "excess", and I saved hundreds of dollars.
This may be different in countries that (1) have significantly smaller budgets than the US does, and (2) frown upon private gun ownership.
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I couldn't disagree more. As a combat veteran myself, I see this as having less than zero educational value, and find it insulting rather than honoring.
Demonstrations of equipment notwithstanding, this serves only to give a deeply flawed impression of what military life, and especially combat, is like.
Turning the worst day of someone's life - and often a defining moment in who they are - into a weekend of fun honors nobody. Though it may be in good faith, it's still rather insulting. "Hey look at me, I can dress up like you did and run up this hill!" "When I did it, they had artillery registered on us, machine guns with interlocking fields of fire, and I was covered in my best friend's blood after I watched him die in front of me. It's still a defining experience of my life 75 years later" "Oh, well obviously we aren't doing any of that, but it'll be fun to show what it was like for you!" This strikes me as beyond tone-deaf and deeply disrespectful, regardless of intent.
Besides the inherently disrespectful nature of this, it's atrociously bad history. As I insinuated above, guys running around in the proper costume shooting blanks at each other is not even a crude facsimile of what combat is like. It's a couple of superficial similarities attempting to mask deep, fundamental differences. And that only obfuscates the realities of war.
We honor those who fought by remembering, by listening to the stories of the few who remain, and making sure as many of those stories are recorded for posterity before it's too late. Turning the horrors of war into a fun weekend event honors no one, educates no one, and is generally a mess. Best not to.
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As a former member of the First Marine Division (2003-2007), I hadn't heard this story. Though in my day, Tootsie rolls were still in MREs. They weren't as popular as M&Ms and Skittles, but more so than Charms. M&Ms were a prized MRE component, but the bags had a a tendency to break, and M&Ms don't do well in the desert heat, so sometimes you'd open an MRE and just have melted chocolate all over everything inside, but if you found an intact bag, that was always good. We also suspected that when M&Ms comes out with those contests - "find whatever and win a massive prize" - those bags go into MREs, where they'll sit on a shelf until well after the contest expires.
As far as Charms being a trail of proverbial breadcrumbs tracing Marines' movements, this is true....but the Charms are mixed in with all the other MRE garbage that just gets thrown off the trucks. Littering is pretty much universal in a war zone. And there's always that one guy who eats Charms, either because he's a boot who doesn't know better, or he's trying to tempt fate. Don't be that guy.
By the way, "1st Marines" refers to the 1st Marine Regiment, an infantry regiment that belongs to 1st MarDiv.
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@Front-Toward-Enemy Again, this is largely nonsense. Yes, the Army was at these places. However, they did not pull their own weight compared to the Marines. On Okinawa, for instance, the Army's 77th division ran into the Japanese buzzsaw and had to be relieved by the First Marine Division, who took the fight to the enemy and won.
Then again, compare and contrast Army fights in places like the Philippines to Marine Corps fights in places like Tarawa. I don't think you can reasonably say that those were battles of similar intensity.
Yes, the Army can field more men than the Corps can. In WWII, the Marine Corps topped out at six divisions, with 6th MarDiv only active for one battle (Okinawa). The Army had dozens. It is undeniably true that a vastly larger force can be more places at once than a smaller one.
It is also undeniably true that wherever the fighting was toughest in the Pacific, you would find United States Marines. Often alone, as on Tarawa and Iwo Jima.
Yeah, some of this has to do with MacArthur's....um...less desirable qualities (the man was a turd who was promoted vastly beyond his ability, as well as being a coward). But part of it also has to do with what the Marine Corps is. There's a reason that America's enemies fear US Marines and spread wild rumors about us - in Iraq, they believed that to join the Corps, we had to kill our parents, in WWII, the Japanese believed we were recruited from insane asylums, etc. Every enemy has a different wild rumor. The Army may be a professional force of well trained soldiers, but the Marine Corps is a warrior cult with training at least as good as the Army's but with a killer ethos that is unmatched. There's a reason you rarely see a pickup truck covered in Army bumper stickers.
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@redaug4212 You're specifically mentioning Guadalcanal and Peleliu as fights where the Army "carried a significant load of the fighting". This is outright false. On Guadalcanal, the brunt of the fighting was carried out by the 1st Marine Division. Then the 2nd Marine Division came in. By the time the Army got there, major resistance was essentially over, and the Army cleaned up after the Marines.
On Peleliu, the Army saw more fighting than on Guadalcanal, but one cannot honestly make the case that they fought like the Marines did.
Okinawa, the Army saw much more fighting than they ever did on Guadalcanal or Peleliu, but again, that battle was won by Marines. The Army got the first real combat there, but then the Corps had to come in and beat the Japanese where the Army could not.
Where was the Army's Tarawa? The Japanese commander there said that a million men in a hundred years couldn't take his atoll from him. It took 10,000 Marines three days. Where was the Army's Iwo Jima? Japanese commander on Iwo, General Kuribayashi, had organized a brilliant defense in depth with heavy fortifications and a network of tunnels, had artillery and machine guns registered on every potential landing zone, and was still destroyed by the Marines.
Yes, it is true that the Army had more troops in the Pacific than the Corps did. This is the very nature of the two branches. But there's a reason that Army lore focuses on Normandy and Bastogne, with hardly a mention of the Pacific. The fact is that the Army fought relatively easy campaigns in the Pacific behind Douglass MacArthur (who famously said in Korea that the safest place to be was behind a battalion of Marines), while the Marines fought absolutely brutal campaigns and performed feats of arms that we are still in awe of today.
Yes, I'm a Marine. I fought in Fallujah with The Old Breed. I'm immensely proud of that. I can't claim that I'm unbiased. But the facts speak for themselves. It was the Marine Corps that ripped the empire from the Japanese grasp.
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@tostie3110 There are plenty of combat veterans still around. I'm a combat vet in my 30s. Most of my friends are combat vets in their 30s.
There were differences in the experience of a soldier in WWII and one today. Nobody doubts that. Different uniforms, different weapons, no body armor or night vision goggles, etc. The combat was a lot more intense than anything that happens today, for sure. And training was expedited as armies worldwide expanded massively.
That being said, there's a reason that every Marine I've ever talked to who fought in WWII instantly accepted me as every bit as much of a Marine as he was, and dismissed the idea that we, in the Corps today, were walking in the footsteps of giants - left by men, by Marines, like them. It's because soldiering has always been soldiering. And despite the weapons and equipment, despite paradigm shifts in military strategy and tactics and leaps in technology, the modern US Marine armed with an M27 IAR and kitted out with all manner of high-tech gear has a whole lot in common with the Roman legionary armed with pila and a sword and armored in iron. The details change, the experience stays the same - from letters home asking for warm socks to graffiti complaining about superiors and drawing dicks.
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Right, adding "trust me I'm a right winger" to the end of your statements doesn't make them any more true. The fact that you call conservatives "low IQ retards" makes me skeptical that you are, and regardless, your own political views are irrelevant. The fact is, we on the right have guns. Lots of them. On the left, almost nobody does - and the guns they do have tend not to be the type that have any military utility. A side-by-side for skeet shooting is not the same as a modern semiautomatic rifle.
Also, what makes you think that the left would "just release a biological weapon?" It's not that simple. First, it requires access to the proper pathogens. This is by no means a universal thing. Then, it requires engineering those pathogens so that they'd be appropriate for use as a weapon, developing a delivery system, and then actually delivering it. This is complicated. They don't just have canisters of airborne Ebola virus sitting around in San Francisco. The last biological attack that I'm aware of was the anthrax mailings in 2001. They killed like six people. That's hardly a winning strategy. A workable mass casualty biological attack would likely take years to produce. Furthermore, in the scenario we're talking about, a civil war based on politics with no clear front lines, even if a mass casualty biological weapon was prepared, it would be almost certain to blow back on those who prepared it as well. So no, your assertion holds no water. Try again.
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Scooter Campbell Nothing you're saying has any grounds in reality whatsoever. It's just basic anti-American nonsense, based solely on the premise that since you don't like the US, nothing that the US does can be good. Then you come up with all manner of bizarre revisionism to justify your ridiculous premise. Japan was not about to surrender. US troops were not (and are not) in the habit of murdering civilian populations, although Japanese propaganda certainly claimed they were to whip up hatred amongst their civilian population. Strategic bombing is not a "war crime", it's the prosecution of strategic objectives. The bombing of cities was considered well within the realm of legal warfare, especially as precision bombing did not exist at the time. Your arguments are nothing but debunked fantasy in a desperate attempt to discredit the US. Japan had ample opportunity to surrender before Hiroshima, and refused. They had opportunity to surrender after Hiroshima, and still they refused. After Nagisaki, they finally realized that continuing to fight was no longer an option, and surrendered. Your claim that they were "about to surrender" is disproven by the fact that they didn't surrender until the second atomic bomb (abound by virtually every historic account, but we won't even get into that). The Japanese knew the war was unwinnable after their defeats at Midway and Guadalcanal, and they continued to fight. After Leyte and Okinawa, when their navy was at the bottom of the sea and their army had been crushed, they still refused to quit. They intended to fight on to the last man, and it took the drastic measures of two atomic bombings to convince them otherwise. Your premise is utter nonsense, you clearly have zero grasp of the history of the Pacific Campaign, and you have nothing of interest to say. I get it, you don't like the US. That's cool and edgy and all that, I'm sure. But teenage angst does not make for good history, and the fact remains that the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to an end and prevented unimaginable carnage in Operation Downfall.
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As a veteran of the Iraq war, a letter is STILL important in wartime. When you're in the infantry, you don't have access to cell phones and internet and whatnot, and written letters from home are the biggest morale booster you can imagine. No matter how bad your day had been, when you got a letter, or two or three, it made that day markedly better. I was lucky, I had a girlfriend who wrote me every day, parents who wrote a couple times a week, and other friends and family who would write occasionally. If we were far enough out that mail was a weekly event instead of a daily one, I'd get a stack of maybe a dozen letters, and as soon as I had a minute of down time, I'd sneak off to as private a place as I could find, read them all, and forget where I was for a few minutes. I had one letter from my girlfriend that even distinctly smelled like her, I kept that one in my flak jacket for a month or two until the scent finally wore off.
The only way I can describe mail call when you're at war is like Christmas morning when you're a little kid. When the mail comes in, it's just like running to look at what Santa left under the tree for you. It's one of the best feelings in the world, in a place where feel-good moments aren't exactly commonplace.
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One Punch Negga You're assuming that the South = the right, which isn't true (just look at an electoral map, the left is essentially limited to urban areas, the right is the rural areas and suburbs). You're also assuming that the left would somehow control nukes. If you'd ever served in the US Military, you'd know that it isn't exactly run by leftists. Also, it isn't exactly easy to just start launching nukes. It's specifically designed to be hard to do. Then there's the extremely asymmetric distribution of weapons. Conservatives own them, leftists don't. Even in a "battleground" state like Pennsylvania, my home state, which has a lot of people from both sides of the aisle, there would be no contest. We have guns, they don't. A bunch of faggots waving rainbow flags and throwing bricks aren't gonna be much good against normal people armed with AR15s.
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ChaoticButterfly The Celts and Vikings did not have women fighting, and the idea of "shieldmaidens" is pure fantasy detached from any actual historical evidence, either archeological or written. Try actually researching your "points" before making them. As for samurai, women would take up arms in defense of the home (just like any women anywhere throughout history). This is not the same as being an actual warrior on campaign, something you seem to have trouble understanding.
Yes, there are exceptional women in the world. The key word being exceptional. You don't make policy based on exceptions, and exceptional people, male or female, can find success in any number of fields. Putting a single woman into the one job where she is least suited, and where her presence is a problem, isn't taking advantage of her talents, it's making her into a problem.
I've heard of that woman, whose name I don't remember, who dressed as a man to fight in the Revolution. If I remember, it all ended poorly. Then there's the more modern record...women like Jessica Lynch, who disgraced herself and the US Army with her cowardice and unpreparedness. Good men died rescuing her. Then there's these "lionesses" in Afghanistan, the female engagement teams who go out and talk to local women. They're an utter waste of resources for no gain. You're taking admin clerks, giving them an infantry escort that could be better used on a real mission, and sending them to talk to...people who have zero agency, thereby gaining nothing useful and annoying their fathers and husbands, who are the ones we're theoretically trying to win over.
Your analogy about Rome is incoherent. If the Celtic women had fought, it would have been mentioned by people like Caesar, who fought the Celts. It's notably absent. Furthermore, the Celts were conquered as Rome was ascending, not declining. And then there's the whole thing about not having women in combat makes them "weak". Um, no. Women not being men doesn't make them weak. It makes them women. A society that fails to understand the difference between men and women is a weakened one; as is a society that has women - people who are biologically unsuited for the task - in combat.
You seem hung up on the fact that some women can be as strong as a man. Noted. That isn't relevant. A woman's body is less durable than that of a man of equal strength. She has less testosterone, and thus cannot have the propensity for aggression and violence that a man has. And the very fact that she's a woman in an all-male culture creates massive problems with unit cohesion, morale, logistics, and literally everything else that matters to a combat unit.
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Women's names were not a reflection of "unbalanced gender roles". They were a reflection of marriage customs and what was necessary. A woman wouldn't have needed as many names as a man would, because she would generally be the only person using her nomen in the household. Women did not take their husband's name when they married, and so would generally be the only person with her name in a household. If, for instance, a Julian man married a Claudian woman, everyone else in the household would be a Julius or Julia, and would need additional names to distinguish them from one another. The Claudian woman, however, would be Claudia - which would be distinct in her household. Additional names would be superfluous.
Also, your pronunciation is awful. The "ii" in a name like Claudii is pronounced "E-E". G is always pronounced hard, never soft. Same with C. V is pronounced like W and J didn't exist until much later. Instead, I was used, and was pronounced soft.
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Molanda Moseley of the FBI Again, none of this is true. Like, literally none of it.
White phosphorus is used for illumination and marking (our incendiaries are thermite). There is nothing anywhere in any international convention that prohibits this. Cluster bombs are used by every major military on earth, and prohibited by zero conventions. Some idiots made up the claim that WP is a "chemical weapon" - this is blatantly untrue and ignores both what WP is and what a chemical weapon is. Anti-war activists like to complain about cluster bombs because of the relatively high dud rate of submunitions, but whinging about something means nothing. The US did not torture anyone - unless you use a definition of "torture" so broad as to be meaningless. "Torture" does not mean "mildly harsh treatment of unlawful combatants" (though if you want to learn something about actual war crimes, look up who is a lawful combatant and who isn't. Also look up perfidy, a common tactic the Iraqis used). Sanctions are a diplomatic tactic used the world over to attempt to discourage international bad actors. It has absolutely nothing to do with the law of war, and is generally a tactic used in peacetime to prevent wars. That you don't know this goes to your willful ignorance.
The US does not recognize the ICC, because the ICC is farcical - it's a kangaroo court that does not come anywhere close to American judicial standards.
Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 - this is your only factual statement. He was, however, a major state sponsor of terror. He hosted Abu Nidal for years. He sponsored suicide bombings in Israel. He invited all manner of foreign mujahidin into Iraq, to shelter them and to use them for his own purposes. Claiming that he was anti-terrorist is a blatant lie.
The invasion of Iraq was not a "war of aggression" by any standard. Saddam failed to surrender his chemical weapons, failed to open his country to UN inspectors, and generally failed to live up to any of the agreements imposed on him by an international coalition in 1991. The fact that you claim otherwise shows a lack of even basic research about the nonsense you're so sure about.
You have just demonstrated even further that you have no idea what you're talking about. You're just repeating nonsense that stupid people have told you.
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When I was in Iraq in 2005-2006, we had something very similar. Even then, we weren't allowed unsecured two-way communication devices, and so letter writing was the best way for us to communicate with people back home and vice versa. So the Marine Corps did something called Moto Mail. Instead of microfilm or whatever, people who wanted to write a deployed Marine could send an email to somebody (I don't know who, I never wrote a Moto Mail, just received them), and then they'd print it out in a format similar to a tax return check and get it to you in a day or two as opposed to about a week. It lacked the personality of a written letter, but it was the quickest way for someone to get in touch with us.
I got Moto Mails from my dad a few times, and a few other family members, including some cousin I didn't know I had who wrote to give me remarkably bad advice (fortunately I knew better) from someone who had never been anywhere near a combat zone. I preferred normal letters.
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@ivanj1806 My friend got one of the new 10mm XDs around Christmas (his wife bought it for him at my suggestion). A couple days after, I went up to visit him, and of course we went to go shoot this new XD in 10mm. We're both 10mm fans, and I'd had good experiences with XDs before (never owned one though). So we go to the range, he gets the first two rounds off, and a failure. Light primer strike. So we try again, another failure, light primer strike. We put those same rounds that weren't working in a Glock 20, they fired - it wasn't the ammo. All day, the XD would fire maybe one out of five or six rounds, the others would be light primer strikes. The Glocks and the SIG we had there would fire anything.
So he managed to take it back to the gun shop, and they sent it back off to Springfield. Apparently it was some kind of extractor issue, I don't remember how an extractor issue would cause light primer strikes, he told me but I've forgotten. It took him several months to get the pistol back. Apparently this is an issue that isn't uncommon with XDs, which is a major quality control problem. A gun needs to work every time, out of the box. A gun that doesn't work every time, out of the box isn't worth buying. Now, most XDs will work fine. But some will be like the one my friend had - gross disappointments. He was lucky that it only fucked up on the range and not when it was needed. But that was enough to prevent me from EVER buying a new XD.
And yes, there is also a political reason. Illinois, where Springfield Armory is located, proposed some horrid gun law. Springfield Armory was willing to support it as long as they got an exemption carved out for themselves. That kind of backstabbing shit tends to alienate Second Amendment advocates. I don't live in Illinois and don't know the details, but it was a scummy move, and I prefer to support companies that support the Second Amendment rights of all Americans.
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Ego Alter In naval artillery, caliber is used to describe barrel length. Thus a 16 inch, 50 caliber naval rifle has a 16" bore, and the barrel is 50x16, or 800 inches, which is close to 67 feet long, and a 5 inch 38 caliber naval rifle has a barrel that's 38x5, or 190 inches, which is a little less than 16 feet. This was explained to me by a guy on the USS New Jersey, an Iowa class battleship that is now a museum (and certainly one worth visiting if you're ever in the Philadelphia area).
However, in small arms, caliber refers to bore diameter. This can be confusing, as both .50 and .38 are common enough calibers for small arms.
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Given the right circumstances, human beings are capable of being monsters. The Stanford Prison Experiment is an excellent example of this. Also, read the book Ordinary Men, by Christopher Browning - it's a study of a battalion of Ordnungspolitzei, or Orpo, made up of middle aged men who grew up before the Nazis took power, and were ordered to murder thousands (if not tens of thousands) of civilians, mostly Jews, during WWII. These were not fanatical Nazis, they were not men who knew nothing else, they were explicitly given a chance to avoid this duty, and yet about 90% of them committed these mass murders, and about 10% took to this duty with a sadistic enthusiasm.
I like to think that I'm better than that, that I'd be a member of the resistance or something, but I don't know. I think it's just as likely that given the right circumstances, I would've been doing something horrible as well. I'm glad I didn't come up under such circumstances.
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@redaug4212 Okay, several issues here.
On Guadalcanal, you're claiming that the Army did what the Corps did, because both defended Henderson Field at various times. I say that this is a false comparison. At the Tenaru, the Corps was working with zero naval support against a strong Japanese army. By the time the Army fought for Henderson Field, we had naval superiority and a broken Japanese army. There's a reason my Old Breed blaze says GUADALCANAL down that red one.
If your main point is that the Pacific Theater was not deadlier than the European Theater, well, I have a couple things to say about that. First is "for who". If you were a pilot or aircrew at all, yeah, the European theater was WAY worse - shot down German pilots would climb into another plane and fight again, shot down Japanese pilots were almost always killed.
If you were fighting on the ground, and this includes the Army, the fight was objectively worse in the Pacific. In Europe, if Allied and German forces surrendered to each other, they could, for the most part, expect halfway decent treatment. Hence, you saw surrenders on both sides when a position became untenable.
In the Pacific, it was a "no quarter" fight. As I routinely tell my Army friend, you surround 100,000 Germans, they surrender. You surround a single Jap, he's gonna try and take as many of you with him as possible.
I salute the accomplishments of the US Army in Europe. I'll even admit they didn't show their ass in the Pacific. But claiming that the Army approached what the Corps did in the Pacific? That's just false.
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ChaoticButterfly Yes, women have testosterone. At very low levels compared to men. Even of she can make it through the training, her body is not nearly as robust as that of a man. She can carry about half of what a man can without serious risk of injury. She lacks the potential to achieve the upper body strength, speed, and stamina. This is a massive problem in and of itself.
More disqualifying than the physical issues are the social ones. Your absurd notions aside, a woman can never be "one of the guys". The idea of a "sister in arms" is frankly laughable, as anyone who has actually served in a combat unit would tell you. The culture of an infantry unit is very testosterone driven and aggressive, and a woman in the mix would throw it all off. As I have previously said, there is no advantage to be gained, and massive disadvantages, to attempting to integrate women into combat units. Letting feminists feel good about themselves isn't worth the harm to military readiness, morale, and unit cohesion. I'm saying this as a former Marine rifleman, and unlike all you "social justice" types, I actually know what I'm talking about.
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As a former 03, you ought to know most of the differences. First, we now have LAR, AMTRAC, and Recon battalions per division. Also, the "three regiments per division" thing is purely theoretical - 3rd MarDiv has one actual regiment, 3rd Marines at K-Bay, and one regiment (4th Marines) on Okinawa that doesn't actually have any battalions (1/4 and 2/4 are at Pendleton, 3/4 is at Twentynine Palms). 3rd MarDiv also lacks a tank battalion. Pioneers don't seem to exist any more, or if they do I sure never heard of them. And obviously, weapons companies are organic to infantry battalions instead of just having one company at the regimental level.
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Altyazılı Dede That number is nonsense. Actually, the US spends about 24% on the military. The vast majority of the US budget is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Redistribution programs that, in an ideal world, wouldn't exist. Our military budget is actually way too low (though so much of it is misappropriated too, which doesn't help). We're wasting literally trillions on the F-35, which is a lemon and a half, while all the equipment that we actually use is ageing rapidly. We need a realistic fleet of F-22s, which we're not buying. We need more carriers than we have, and we're dragging our feet. We needed the EFV for the Marine Corps, and that got cancelled, and so now Marines will be riding into battle in obsolete vehicles. What we really need is a modern strike fighter, which we don't even have in development, because the F-35 nonsense. We need a modern naval fighter, which we don't have, because F-35. We're wasting so much of our limited military budget on nonsense like ridiculous failed attempts at integrating women into combat, and we're not getting the things we need.
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Rogue Planet No, that's not what I did. I heard your absurd plan about using "science" and "technology" to impose utopia upon humanity and end all suffering. I, as a reasonable and educated man, am aware that people before you have had very similar ideas about how to form the perfect world, and that such plans invariably end in untold suffering and some of the world's worst crimes against humanity, because they ALWAYS fail to take free will and human nature into account. As such, the details of your plan are inherently unrealistic and irrelevant. Fortunately, you're nobody, and your plans will go nowhere. But the existence of people like you is the reason the rest of us must remain eternally vigilant, and educate ourselves to the point where we can use the power of words, and free speech - something impossible under your theory - to make better arguments for liberty and humanity than you can for totalitarianism.
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The Japanese didn't actually do any strategic bombing in the Pacific, so I'm not sure where that's coming from. If you're talking about the attack on Pearl Harbor, that wasn't a war crime because of the target, it was because of the surprise attack without warning (though it's true that people should've known) or a declaration of war or anything like that. Nobody claimed that the Japanese bombing of American ships or land positions (which were basically all the Japanese bombed) was a war crime. If we're talking about bombing in China, that's not a subject I know all that much about and will have to look further into it before expressing an opinion.
The Japanese had attempted to negotiate surrender through the Soviets, that much is true. But that's only half of the story. The terms that the Japanese proposed were ridiculous, and included things like supervising their own disarmament, trying their own war criminals, and keeping their government intact. These were obviously not acceptable terms of surrender, and thus they were rejected. Until the atomic attacks, the Japanese had never seriously contemplated unconditional surrender - they knew they were losing, and intended to make the remainder of the war as bloody as possible in the hope that extensive American casualties would bring the US to accepting a peace agreement short of unconditional surrender. This is why the mobilization of the civilian population for Operation Downfall. The Japanese wanted a bloodbath. The fact that their army and population was ill-equipped is irrelevant - banzai charges don't require any fuel. The Japanese knew where the landings would come (because the geography of Japan leaves very limited options for landing sites), and would have thrown everything they could at the landings in an attempt to create as much mayhem as possible. Casualty estimates vary, but at least a million Allied casualties (that includes wounded, by the way) is a pretty well agreed upon number, plus countless Japanese.
Nobody threatened Japan with nuclear weapons, because they were top secret, and letting the enemy know you have them works to his advantage, not yours.
The difference between the bombing of strategic targets and terrorist attacks on civilians ought to be very stark. Dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima - the headquarters of an army - is a legitimate military act, especially in the days before precision bombing. Detonating a car bomb in a marketplace is not. The two are very, very different. One destroys an enemy army and demonstrates to the enemy government that further resistance is futile. The other just kills random people to no concrete objective other than to terrorize the survivors. The idea that the atomic bombs were not the reason Japan surrendered is ludicrous; Hirohito even mentioned them in his radio address to the nation, and an American pilot, under torture, had claimed that the US had 100 more of the bombs (we had one more and were readying a second).
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Exactly. In my mind, this calls into question everything else we allegedly know about Zaitsev. He certainly existed, and I think that it's likely that he was a successful sniper in Stalingrad. The problem is that the whole centerpiece of his legend is pure fiction from the minds of Soviet propagandists. In fact, I think the legends of all these Soviet war heroes should be taken with, at minimum, a massive grain of salt. The Soviets weren't exactly known for being sticklers to the truth.
Oh, and Enemy at the Gates sucked. They took the legend, which is admittedly a good story, regardless of how demonstrably false it may be, and then Hollywoodized it with a bunch of love triangles and crap that makes it entirely uninteresting. I disliked it when I saw it in theaters, then I recently gave it another chance, and hated it.
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Molanda Moseley of the FBI None of that is defensible. First, knock it off with the "war for oil" trope. It's false. The US is the world's largest producer of oil, and the majority of our oil is produced domestically. As for imports, most of those come from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia - in that order. We didn't need or particularly want Iraqi oil.
Second, the cassus belli in Iraq was painfully obvious to everyone - however much people have conveniently forgotten. Saddam was by no means "innocent", Iraq was by no means a "victim", and even the trope about no WMDs existing is demonstrably false - there were indeed chemical weapons in Iraq, and at least six American troops were injured by them. This is, of course, to say nothing of Saddam's consistent, open, and unrepentant sponsorship of terrorism.
Third, you can't actually name a single "war crime" allegedly committed. You can only point vaguely to things you don't like and call them "war crimes" based on nothing. It isn't even hyperbole, it's pure fabrication.
You are entirely wrong about everything here. When you shout "war criminal", you're saying "I don't understand his foreign policy, but I'm pretty sure I disagree with it". And by doing so, you are destroying any credibility that you may have had.
So just stop. You're making a fool of yourself by being willfully stupid.
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Dante war Yes, the Egyptian army buys cool toys from the US. That doesn't mean they're capable of fighting well. Their training, like the training of every other Arab army, is abysmal. Their officer corps is useless. Their job is to control their own population, not to fight other armies, and especially not civilized ones as the Israelis have. I don't care how many troops and tanks Egypt has, I'd much rather have well trained and well led troops in a smaller force than a massive rabble.
Egyptians, like all paynim savages, have a massive problem with Jews. All the Egyptian Jews are in Israel or the US by now.
And no, American pilots never flew sorties for Israel. There were certainty no American tanks on the ground there. Quit making excuses, Israel beat the savages because they are civilized.
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***** You're talking about people who are literally starving, and have zero outside information about how the world works. South Korea has problems integrating defectors who come one at a time, a whole country's worth of them would be a massive undertaking. These are also people who have spent their entire lives being told how horrible South Korea is, who have no idea how to function in a market economy, and don't even understand the concept of political freedom. It would be literally impossible to seamlessly integrate that into South Korea, which is a modern country, with the world's 17th largest economy.
I understand that the people want reunification. That's quite obvious. The point I'm trying to make is that it would be far harder than you're making it out to be - half the peninsula has no infrastructure to speak of to the point where they don't get electricity. It isn't so simple as "Ok, we're all one country again".
The issue of political freedom alone presents a massive problem for the South Korean government. South Korea has about 50 million people. North Korea has close to 25 million. Reunification would be adding half again the population overnight. This massive population influx has never been allowed to vote in a free and fair election. They've been so heavily brainwashed that very few probably even understand the concept. That makes them a huge wild card in the political process. And whatever the claims about desiring reunification may be, what politicians want is to hold on to power. No politician is going to want to take that kind of a risk.
Besides the "we have no idea what they'll do with the vote" issue, there's also the issue of adding half again your population of desperately poor, poorly educated people who don't understand the very basis of your economic system. Many if not most North Koreans would be unemployable in a modern economy. It will cost an immense amount of money over a generation to integrate these people and their children into a sane society. This money has to come from somewhere, it won't materialize out of nowhere. This would require enormous additional revenue for the South Korean government, almost none of which will come from the North itself, as North Korea's chief exports are counterfeit US dollars and illicit drugs. Even if, as you say, companies flock North to take advantage of North Korea's mineral wealth, It would take years before they're able to unfuck the current state of North Korea to the point where they can actually turn a profit. This is a project that would literally cost trillions of dollars.
Then there's also the China issue. Like it or not, China is a regional hegemon, and is happier with two Koreas than one, because the status quo, as imperfect as it may be, keeps American troops off their border. China will continue to prop up the North Korean government by any means necessary to prevent reunification. Assuming that nobody wants a Sino-American war, China's view of the situation is vitally important.
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The deaths prevented by banning guns would be offset by the deaths CAUSED by banning guns, too. Guns are used for defensive purposes many times more than they're used in crimes. A man who plans to overpower a woman, rape her, and strangle her, will think twice when she has a .380 in her purse. Some thugs trying to rob a guy walking to his car from work after dark will stop when he pulls his concealed pistol. The scumbag who tries to break into my home some night will find himself staring down the barrel of a loaded AR15. Even without a shot being fired, the sight of a gun will cause most criminals to rethink their plans. Unfortunately for us Second Amendment supporters, the number of deaths prevented by law-abiding citizens with firearms is incalcuable. The number of defensive uses of guns is estimated anywhere between 200,000 and 3 million per year, which far outpaces the number of gun murders even at the lowest estimate. We live in an imperfect world, and until we can "social engineer" crime out of existence (which would be utterly Orwellian either way, and thus undesirable), guns in the hands of good guys will stop guns in the hands of bad guys enough to make a difference. In my native New York City, guns are de facto banned. You have to pay something like a $640 fee to get a permit to even buy a gun at all, which takes about six months, and if you get it at all, it then needs to be registered (and the types of guns allowed are heavily restricted). Carrying a gun in New York, in theory, is legal with a permit. In practice, those permits are not issued (this is one of the MANY reasons I no longer live in New York). There are still hundreds of murders per year in NYC, most of which are committed with guns. A Bronx gang-banger who wants to kill a rival is undeterred by the insane gun laws.
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@PrettyPieHead Crixus' hair is just a symptom of the clear lack of research that they did, and I didn't mention Oenomaus at all because I couldn't think of how to spell his name (that E after the initial O is what I was missing). I don't mind Oenomaus being reimagined as African as much as I mind Crixus not having curly hair, because it isn't obvious by his name that he isn't African.
For historical fiction covering an event that lacks a lot of detail in primary sources, I don't mind some creative license being taken. But with that ridiculous show, there was zero authenticity at all. We may not know all that many details about Spartacus or the Third Servile War, but we do know a lot about Roman society in the first century BC, and the show basically threw all of that out in favor of silly fantasy. And yes, the dialogue was incredibly bad and unnatural sounding ("thank you" and "I'm sorry" are far more natural sounding phrases than "gratitude" and "apologies"), and yes, a lot of the acting was over the top and ridiculous. But the main thing is that they made no effort whatsoever to attempt authenticity. You wouldn't have had a bunch of people of senatorial rank hanging out with a lanista - because lanista was not an even remotely respectable career, it was like being a pimp, a procuror of human flesh.
Contrast with HBO's show Rome, which was far better in every way. There you saw natural sounding dialogue (even if the attempts at Latin were all atrocious), realistic relationships between people of different social classes, and an authentic if not entirely accurate look at what life in ancient Rome looked like. Spartacus may as well have been set in Middle Earth or Westeros for all of the authenticity that it offered.
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Of course I haven't read every saga, but I do know that in English (what with me being a native English speaker and all) Ragnar Lodbrok is ALWAYS spelled and pronounced with the D, not the TH. And Hrolf is either referred to in English as Hrolf the Walker or Gangahrolf. It would be nice if they were speaking Old Norse, but as half-assed as that show is, I can see why they're not. It would also be nice if they managed just a little historical accuracy on a couple things, but they don't seem to be going for that, either.
I haven't watched the show past the first half of the first season, after that I became too disgusted and gave it up. In the first episode they're acting like there's nothing to the West of Scandinavia, and "Ragnar Lothbrok" has this "revolutionary" idea that there is land, ie the British Isles, to the West. This is ridiculous.
You claimed that this moronic show is based on Icelandic sagas, I was pointing out how taking a couple characters from them and a couple unrelated historic events and throwing them all in one jumble is neither true to history (which I know quite a bit about) nor true to the sagas.
And they got almost no details right, especially about society. They put these people in a feudal system first and foremost, which is every bit as anachronistic as putting them in the Roman Republic. Then, they make the feudal system such that if you kill the Jarl, you become Jarl yourself, which is just pure fiction. Then they have shieldmaidens, for which there is zero historic evidence, and it is HIGHLY unlikely that such a thing ever existed, because it's an incredibly bad idea on every level. Then they have these ridiculous monstrous priest-demon things, which is also completely false. Oh, and explaining how the guy getting executed is going to Valhalla, which isn't how Norse paganism worked. And of course the whole "my slaves are my equals" thing which was clearly designed more to appeal to modern sensibilities than to give any air of authenticity whatsoever. If you think they got details right, I'd suggest reading some history books on the period, because that shit is no more accurate than Game of Thrones, which at least admits that it's fantasy.
I don't remember any jewelry off hand, but the weapons aren't particularly accurate (I recall some rather ridiculous axes and swords slung over shoulders and a conspicuous lack of spears), the "armor" and costumes are by no means accurate, and the ships are really the one redeeming feature of the show. They're done beautifully.
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Aussie Militant The fact was that you did send your troops to Europe and North Africa. I knew some Australian soldiers, and would never speak ill of the Australian Army, but the fact remains that you were not prepared for the Japanese, who were the type of major power that Australia was not. Whether or not Japan intended to actually invade Australia is irrelevant; both Australia and the US believed that they did. Guadalcanal would have been an excellent staging point for such an invasion, and the American attack on Guadalcanal was meant to stop an invasion of Australia, whether or not such invasion was planned.
I appreciate Australia. You are the only country on earth who has fought alongside Americans in every conflict since WWI. I own an Australian "jelly bean suit" that I traded one of your soldiers for a set of my own cammies. Don't take anything I say as anti-Australian, because it certainly isn't meant that way. But the fact of the matter is, in the Pacific Theater, your contribution to the war effort was negligible compared to that of the United States. You yourself have admitted that the bulk of your army was deployed elsewhere by the time that war broke out. I'm not saying that you didn't fight. I'm just saying that in the wider Pacific war, the Americans did the overwhelming majority of the fighting.
In the planned Operation Downfall, there was to be a single Australian division, plus an air wing, out of 52 total divisions.
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The Saudis have cool toys, but I seriously doubt that they can use them effectively. From what I've seen in Iraq, Arabs make piss-poor soldiers - virtually untrainable. I have two friends whose fathers, while serving in east bloc militaries, were tasked to train Arabs as well, including one as a pilot (the air force is Saudi Arabia's biggest advantage). He said that Arab pilots were completely useless. F-15s are really good planes, but if the pilots flying them are barely trained knuckleheads, it doesn't really matter how good the planes are, and I suspect, based on everything I know, that Saudi F-15 pilots (and all pilots in general) are barely trained knuckleheads mostly there because they're third cousins of the al-Sauds or whatever.
I don't think that Iran's military is much better. In fact, I suspect that any war between Iran and Saudi Arabia would very quickly devolve into an extended conflict between various Sunni and Shia terror groups competing to bomb each other's mosques and similar savagery. Either way, I'd love to see the Saudis and the Iranians just bleed each other. Let wolf rend wolf, as they say.
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I've never done any reenacting myself, because I've seen WWII reenactors do their thing, and they looked ridiculous. People with no military training attempting tactical maneuvers and whatnot just look like clowns. I was in a real war, and have never felt the need as an adult to play at war. Obviously Roman legionary reenactors have no actual training and will be doing it wrong. That being said, the general lack of armor for the right arm specifically strikes me as odd to say the least. I can think of two possible solutions: First, that the Romans figured it wasn't worth the logistical hassle of having another piece of gear to give to troops who would probably just lose it or break it anyway (at least if Roman legionaries were anything like US Marines, and I suspect they were). Second, they may have decided that armor on the arm was an encumbrance, that any protective value it may have had was offset by reduced effectiveness at throwing a pilum, or something to that effect. All armor is a compromise, and armor that protects you but prevents you from fighting effectively is not a good one. It would be interesting to see statistics from Roman campaigns about where on the body most wounds were taken, and I suspect that it would be the right arm/hand, but I don't think any such data exists.
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peabase No, it doesn't have its merits. Restricting gun rights is tyrannical and inexcusable. It makes nobody safer, in fact, tightening gun laws virtually always leads to a spike in crime. Basically, freedom is dependent on four boxes: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. In Europe, the soap box is already heavily restricted, and you can be imprisoned for what is arbitrarily called "hate". The ballot box is also less of a protection, as bureaucrats in Brussels make laws for everyone. And now you're losing the cartridge box, with is liberty's last line of defense. So don't be a fool, don't think they're keeping you safe, because they're not. They're just further infringing on your very agency as a human being. It's just one more step down the path to an Orwellian nightmare.
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peabase A deactivated SMG. Why on earth would you buy such idiocy? Congratulations, you own a movie prop at best. It may have been a firearm at some point, but it sure isn't now. And guess what? If I wanted an oversized paperweight like that, I could buy it too, except without restrictions, because it is in no sense an actual firearm. But hey, you need a massive, supernational bureaucracy to make sure it's safe for you to own a paperweight, and you thank them for it, as they pass magazine restrictions and arbitrary bans on calibers and whatever other idiocy they think of next. And then you repeat "assault rifle", which shows me that you don't really know much about firearms at all, because that moronic term is only popular among gun control nuts, and has no actual meaning other than "gun that some asshole thinks is scary looking". A very few US states have arbitrary laws about "assault rifles" on the books, I don't live in one of them, and the rest of us are good. Your referring to the US electoral system as "flawed" shows your gross ignorance. Our electoral system (assuming you mean the electoral college) is specifically designed so that a couple of large states do not get to take control of the entire country. Like you know how Germany controls the EU? California can't do the same to the US, because of the electoral college. This is a very good thing to have. Yes, we elected Trump, and yes, Trump is somewhat of a clown. But considering who he was running against, it's a relief that he was elected. And instead of hiring his friends, as you say, he's mostly actually hiring smart people who are qualified for their jobs - James Mattis was floated as a 3rd party candidate against Trump, Ben Carson and Rick Perry actually did run against him, Nikki Haley refused to endorse him, etc. And as far as bypassing congress, that was Hussein Obama you're thinking of. Yeah, Trump is far from perfect, but at least he's not Angela Merkel.
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peabase I'm not sure what you're failing to understand here. First, a gun that has been deliberately destroyed so as to render it inoperable is a stupid purchase. Full stop. You wouldn't buy a car with the axle cut up with a torch and concrete poured into the engine block, would you?
There is a vast difference between an organic union (so to speak) like the US and a forced one like the EU. Americans are one people with a shared history, language, and culture. It's not the same as taking twenty someodd countries as different as Finland and Greece and thrusting them into a supernational union that destroys national sovereignty. It's far more akin to the USSR than the US, though admittedly not nearly as horrible - yet.
In the US, cabinet members are unelected, but they also have no legislative power. This is very important. All our laws must originate in one of the two houses of congress, who are elected and accountable to voters. This is not how the EU works. I'm not sure if you're failing to grasp these differences or being deliberately obtuse.
Again, you're shouting some nonsense about "assault rifles", a term that we've fully established is meaningless. And some sophistry about how if you're in the military reserves, your magazines and semiauto rifles are exempt from various bans. How lovely. See, I got out of the military (USMC) in 2007, and my final reserve obligation ended in 2011. But I like having semiautomatic rifles with standard capacity magazines. And the cool thing about being American is that I can buy them with minimal hassle, regardless of the fact that I'm not in the reserves. And whatever insane laws that the Germans and French want regarding firearms have literally zero effect on me, because I live in a country that doesn't submit its sovereignty to a creepy supernational organization.
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@RichardCranium321 Oh, I agree entirely. I think that any of us should be able to walk into a store, exchange cash for an M240 that came off the line yesterday, and walk out with that M240, no questions asked. I also can't see a reasonable argument against that under the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, the current body of law disagrees with us, and, well, they have bigger guns than we do. If the firearms industry was willing to help us in the fight for our rights, I think we'd see them restored rather quickly. But unfortunately companies like Glock and Colt and FN make too much on government contracts, and aren't willing to step up. And other companies (most notoriously Ruger, but Springfield Armory as well, and there have been others) have actively worked against us.
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I am an American, a US Marine, and an admitted Anglophile. I've seen the Royal Marines, your "Bootnecks", in action and I can say that they are as fine fighting men as any on the planet. Y'all British do more with less than even the USMC does (your L85 is an abysmally bad rifle).
I love the Brits, and I'd be happy to fight alongside you any day, but yeah, your forces are too small. I'd love to see you build them up, because the world knows that there's nothing scarier than facing English speakers across a battlefield. I just hope that if it ever comes to war, our cousins across the pond have the numbers it takes.
As an aside, y'all may not have enough submarines, but you are FAR better at naming them than we are. HMS Vengeance is by far the best named ship on the planet. What better name for a second strike doomsday weapon? Our boomers are named after states, besides one named after some politician. Royal Navy ships in general have proud names, compared to boring US Navy ones, but Vengeance compared to Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson isn't even a comparison
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Nobody drank lager or porter in Tudor England - neither style had been invented. Porter became popular in the 18th century, and lager, which uses a different yeast variety than ale and is cold stored for several weeks, wasn't invented until the 19th century. Furthermore, modern malting techniques are very different than those of the distant past, which leads to modern beer being, for the most part, very different than in Tudor era England. Also, hops were only just beginning to become popular as a beer flavoring at the time. Most beers were instead flavored with a gruit, which is a mix of different herbs that can vary wildly. If you want a modern approximation of historical ales, they are available, though not easy to find. Or you can always brew your own. Brown malt and smoked malt are your friends if you do.
- a professional brewer
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I find a lot of this highly tacky and disrespectful. Exhibiting the working vehicles and equipment of the era is certainly valuable (and probably really fun as well). The rest of this? It's foolish and satirical.
This isn't an assault on a beach. It isn't training for an assault on a beach. It's amateur theater posing as history, and in doing so, it gives a lot of false impressions, and inhibits understanding rather than increasing it.
These guys are playing army. They're doing so with nice costumes and good gear, but in the end, they're still playing. That silliness is not what the invasion at Normandy was like. Sure, the clothes and equipment are correct, but the atmosphere is, by necessity, sanitized past the point where it can be called a "reenactment". There's no life or death struggle here. There's no risk - nothing is at stake, we all know the good guys win, and at the end of the day, nobody gets hurt and everyone takes off their costumes and has a beer together. I find all of this deeply disrespectful. War is serious, it's hard, and it can be hellish. It isn't a lark for a weekend before heading back to your job as an accountant or whatever on Monday morning - and trying to "reenact" it as such misses all the important points so hard that this can only be considered satire.
That a few WWII vets shook hands with these clowns struck me as sad. I'm a veteran myself. I know that if, 50 years from now, I see a bunch of clowns dressed up like Marines "reenacting" Fallujah, I'll step in and put a stop to it.
I understand that this is (largely) done in good faith. But good faith or not, it isn't, and shouldn't be acceptable. It's not quite stolen valor, but it's very close. Nobody with actual military experience would walk through that camp and see soldiers. A bunch of middle-aged fat guys (and women!) dressed in appropriate costumes does not a military camp make, and the atmosphere and general demeanor of everyone involved is entirely unlike that of a military unit.
The vehicles are really cool - tanks and planes and everything else. I'm all for that kind of stuff. A demonstration of the individual soldier's gear also has some value. But mash this all together into a bloodless (literally and figuratively) pretend "invasion", and you're diminishing any historical understanding you get from the demonstrations, and essentially making a mockery of history and of the men who fought and died there.
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Craft beers do not necessarily have flavors or adjuncts added. I'm a craft brewer by trade, and while I have made beers with fruit, spices, and sugar sources besides malted grain, those beers are in the minority. Most of the beers I've made at three different breweries were Reinheitsgebot complient - including the beers I've made in several German styles.
That being said, German beer is inferior in virtually every way to the beers of neighboring Belgium, which has never had any laws determining what ingredients can be used in beer production. With Belgian beers, brewers can (and do) use all manner of of unmalted grains, of fruits, spices, pure beet sugar (either caramelized or not, which bumps up the alcohol percentage of the final product, dries the beer out, and, if caramelized, adds color and flavor as well), and various other ingredients.
Traditional English brewing also frequently involves ingredients like unmalted roasted barley and lactose sugar for stouts.
Reinheitsgebot compliance has zero effect on the quality of the finished beer. To make a good beer requires a knowledge of the ingredients and the process, and attention to detail at every level. I've had (and made) wonderful beers that included all manner of ingredients that are banned by silly German purity laws, and many uninspired and boring beers that follow those laws to a t.
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Eh, when you're at the level of body counts in the millions, there's really no point in debating who was "worse". Overall, Stalin killed more people than Hitler did, but he also had like 30 years to do so instead of Hitler's 12. Hitler had the death camps, the industrial murder which has never been seen before or since, but Stalin was even more arbitrary in who he murdered than Hitler was (in Nazi Germany, if you followed the rules, you'd be relatively safe, whereas in Stalin's USSR, anyone could end up with a bullet tp the back of the head).
Basically, both of them were at the absolute worst level of humanity, as both oversaw the deliberate murder of millions of people for no good reason. Which of them was worse than the other is an entirely pointless conversation, it's the same as arguing whether terminal lung cancer is "worse" than terminal liver cancer.
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@JeepWrangler1957 I think the big difference is how their respective regimes ended. Nazi Germany was invaded and dismantled, and their atrocities were put on display for all the world to see. We've all seen footage taken by liberators of concentration camps, we all know about the Nuremburg trials, etc.
Stalin, on the other hand, died peacefully (more or less) in his bed, and his regime outlived him by close to 40 years. By 1991 when the USSR fell, most of the perpetrators of the worst Stalinist atrocities were dead, the GULags were long closed, and everything could be quietly swept under the rug.
In the end, we remember Hitler as the embodiment of evil but not Stalin because we got a better look at what he did.
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There's also the issue of competence. The Australian Army is a very competent, well trained, and professional force. I've never seen their Navy or Air Force, but I would assume they're much the same.
The PLA isn't. I'd take a Digger over some Chinese conscript any day.
Also, this scenario ignored the US, which isn't realistic. Australia's defensive posture counts on American aid - and they'd get it, too. The US doesn't appreciate our allies being bullied, and Australia is the only country on earth to have fought alongside us in every war since 1914. The military alliance between the US and Australia is very close - my opinions of the Australian Army is from having met some of them when they were training at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, California, where I was stationed.
Were it not for the US, Australia's military would certainly be much larger.
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@intreuefestundlachen1883 Unlike in France, there were no persecutions of former loyalists in the US. After the Revolution, many of them set sail for England because they either feared persecution or didn't want to have anything to do with the new United States, but there wasn't any mass persecution.
As for how he was oppressive?
I'll let Thomas Jefferson answer that:
Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
"He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
"He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
"He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
"He has dissolvedRepresentative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness of his invasions on the rights of the people.
"He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
"He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
"He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
"He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
"He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
"He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
"He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
"For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
"For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
"For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
"For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
"For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
"For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
"For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
"For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
"For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
"He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging Waragainst us.
"He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
"He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people"
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Whatever else anyone can say about the British, they are by far and beyond the world's best country at naming naval vessels. HMS Terror is an outstanding name. In America, it would be named after some congressman who spent 40 years in Congress and sponsored a few naval spending bills. In Japan, it would be named something really faggy sounding like "cherry blossom".
Pretty much everyone else names their ships after people and places, which is boring. The Japanese come up with weird "poetic" names which are absolutely ridiculous for warships (IJN Zuikaku, one of the carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor, has a name that translates to "Auspicious Crane". Absurd.). But the British give their ships names that would make the sailors proud to serve on them. HMS Vengeance is a ballistic missile submarine. How utterly appropriate for a second-strike doomsday weapon to be named Vengeance. And a lot of their old carriers had names like Glorious, Illustrious, Invincible, Courageous, etc (admittedly HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, their two current carriers, have lame names).
I wish the US Navy would take a hint from the Brits when it comes to naming warships. It just doesn't sound as intimidating when USS John C Stennis is steaming towards your coast as it would with a ship named Indomitable or Victorious.
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I wonder how much this stuff would apply at full speed in an actual fight. The closest relevant experience I have is in the Marine Corps, where the martial arts program teaches you a bunch of moves that can be diagrammed out in manuals, but then as soon as you get in an actual fight, even for training purposes, most of the diagrams go out the window - some of the fundamentals you learn may still apply, but the more elaborate the moves, the less likely they are to work at full speed when the other guy wants to get you and avoid getting hit himself.
Unfortunately, I see no safe and ethical way to determine this, and these manuals, as imperfect as they are, appear to be the best we've got.
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@markharrison2544 I don't, and your idiotic conspiracy theories are utterly detached from reality.
The fact of the matter is that Churchill was a great man. Arguably the best of the 20th century. However, your politics don't align with his, and so you're willing to ignore the actual historical record to slander a great man, simply because you don't like his politics.
Let me guess, you claim to hate "Nazis" and "fascists". Well, Churchill was the mind behind defeating ACTUAL Nazis and ACTUAL fascists. I'm not talking about uninformed posts on social media, I'm talking about real resolve and real strategic planning to defeat bona fide authoritarian regimes, not just "people who hold opinions different from yours".
It's a shame that you've blinded yourself with a ridiculous ideology. That your hatred of those who see things differently from you has led you to such indefensible "beliefs" that you claim to hold about one of the greatest men in history. That your hatred has led you to conspiracy theories about how Churchill was never elected, or how he was somehow magically the captain of a German submarine, or whatever other nonsense. You're entitled to your own opinion, but you aren't entitled to your own facts.
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First, there have been a grand total of zero Medal of Honor "winners". It's not a contest, and the medal is generally awarded for the worst - and more often than not the last - day in the recipient's life.
Second, most Medals of Honor from before WWI are, at best, suspect. Before WWI, the medal was awarded for any number of things that might get you a Letter of Commendation today. A number of them were awarded for non-combat actions. This is not to say that EVERY Medal of Honor from the pre-WWI era is bullshit, several were awarded to actual heroes for actually heroic acts...but those were a minority (see the examples in the video).
On another note, I recently had the honor to meet an actual Medal of Honor recipient, a fellow Marine who fought in Vietnam. I asked him if I could take a picture with him, and he allowed it. He offered me a coin. Now, I've always been of the opinion that challenge coins are kinda gay, and the only one I owned was given to me and every other Marine in my battalion in Iraq. But when a little old man who is an absolute giant despite standing several inches shorter than my own 5'7 frame offers you a coin, you graciously accept it, as I did. I'm not ever parting with that memento of the time I met the kind of Marine who I've always idolized.
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"One of the few wrong decisions".
Yeah, Roosevelt was easily our worst president ever, with Woodrow Wilson being the only one to come even close.
Besides the internment of the Japanese Americans, his worst offense, he prolonged the depression, threatened the courts into submission, abandoned any pretense of Constitutional principles like limited government and checks and balances, refused to step down after two terms (it's a good thing he died when he did. It's highly doubtful that he would have stepped down voluntarily), behaved in a sycophantic and overly conciliatory manner towards Stalin - abandoning Eastern Europe to 45 years of slavery....
Roosevelt made two good decisions in his presidency. He (1) signed the repeal of Prohibition, though by that time it was a bipartisan consensus, and anyone in office would have done the same, and (2) let Churchill, a man of infinitely superior intellect and character, set wartime strategic goals.
Roosevelt gets a lot of undeserved credit for being president during a time of crisis. He exacerbated one crisis (the depression) while using it as an excuse to ignore the Constitution, and handled the other (the war) well by not meddling, for the most part, though his attitude towards Stalin was naive and foolish. He should've listened to Churchill on that as well.
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If you haven't visited the Battleship USS New Jersey, it's a must-see. Camden, NJ, right across the river from Philadelphia, is, to put it nicely, not a nice place - the epitome of urban blight. But on the Delaware River in Camden is this magnificent battleship, staffed in large part by veterans of her various campaigns. These men clearly love her, are proud of her, and will go on in depth about her history, her specifications, her awards, etc. I've been to other museum ships (including USS Intrepid in New York, which has the best name of any American aircraft carrier in history, a great collection of planes, and still isn't a great experience).
If you're ever in the Philadelphia area, there are two museums that are an absolute must-see. Independence Hall ought to be mecca for any American, and anyone else who has any interest in American history/culture/what have you. It's America's birthplace, and should be visited. After that, USS New Jersey is a short trip across the river in her namesake state. And is easily the best museum ship I've visited, and worth a trip for anyone who is interested in WWII, Naval warfare, or history in general. 10/10, absolute need to see in your lifetime.
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As an American, I can say that learning about firearms at a young age is generally a good thing. I grew up in New York City, which has draconian gun laws, but most of my friends were given a .22 rifle for their 7th birthday. Any children I have will be given a .22 rifle for their 7th birthdays as well. In this case, it was very unfortunate that this girl was handed a weapon that she could not physically use safely. However, bad judgment on behalf of a very few people is a terrible reason to restrict ANY rights, including gun rights. I recently was at a "machine gun tourism" spot in Tennessee. I got to shoot on full auto for the first time since I got out of the Marine Corps 10 years ago. I shot a G36 on full auto. Granted, I have actual military training, but I don't think that that matters. I have no children, but I wouldn't be likely to let my hypothetical 9-year-old daughter shoot an Uzi. That is not to say, by any means, that if some parents have a nine-year-old girl, and decide that it is safe for her to shoot an Uzi, and that properly trained range authorities concur that it is safe, that this hypothetical girl shouldn't be allowed to shoot (on an aside, I don't like the Uzi, because I'm left-handed and I tend to accidentally engage the safety catch as I try to press the trigger). An accident, no matter how horrific, is by no means an excuse for additional infractions on basic rights like gun ownership.
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@PandiiMan Wrong. Truth is what is important, not whether subjective "good" can come from the truth.
The Koran is not the Bible. It is not even the equivalent of the Bible. Once people begin to understand this, then maybe people will stop defending Islam at all costs. There is a difference between Biblical violence - David killed Goliath, Samson killed the Philistines, etc - and Koranic violence - Slay the infidels where you find them, smite their necks and the tips of their fingers, etc. The former is a third person recounting of what specific people did at specific times to other specific people - they are stories. The latter is in the second person imperative - it is exhorting people who believe in such filth to go commit violence in its name. It would be like instead of saying "David killed Goliath", the Bible said "all Jews and Christians must go out and murder every Philistine you see". If that was the case, such a criticism would be legitimate. It is not, however.
Ideologies formed by evil or foolish men can be inherently evil. Look at the history of the 20th century, and socialism in its various forms from the Bolsheviks to the Nazis to Pol Pot. Evil ideologies help give evil men power. The ideologies act as an excuse for the acts of evil men. Islam is certainly an evil ideology, and as such it brings out the worst in everyone, and rewards the basest instincts of the truly evil.
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All trains are shitty, but we don't have as many of them in America because there isn't a market for them. People here drive, because driving is more convenient in every way, and unlike Europe, it's affordable. I live in the Philadelphia area, and frequently travel to the New York area where I have family and friends. To take a train from Philly to New York takes about three hours, and then requires taking a bus on either end of the trip. Taking my truck costs less, is quicker, gets me right to where I'm going, and avoids getting stuck in with the kind of cretins who take trains, and usually do their best to make it an even more miserable experience by making a racket. So yeah, you have extortionate taxes that pay for "nice" trains, but we get to keep our hard earned money, and can afford to drive. Looks like another thing Europeans will act snobbishly about when it turns out they have it far worse.
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hedgehog3180 Aside from GPS, and satellites, none of what you mentioned is practical, and much of it could be considered a massive waste of taxpayer money. Going to Mars? Why? It's a cool idea, I'll give you that, but what practical purpose does it have? We don't gain anything tangible from going to Mars or beyond, or looking at distant planets. On the other hand, we have a military that's essentially on life support after eight years of a bad president cutting their budget and forcing idiotic "social justice" policies on them, as well as 15 years of war. Equipment gets worn out and/or becomes obsolete. Only about a third of the Marine Corps' aircraft are airworthy, and the Navy and Air Force are only slightly better off in that regard. Our F-15s, F-16s, and F/A-18s are ageing airplanes with no viable replacement. We're sinking trillions into the F-35, which from all reports doesn't do anything well, it can't fight, it can't run, and it isn't as undetectable as Lockheed Martin likes to claim. We need to restart the F-22 program, and develop reasonable 5th generation strike fighters for the Air Force and Navy. The Obama regime killed the EFV, and the Marine Corps now will have to rely on 1970s AAVs to get from ship to shore. These have next to no armor, are undergunned, and are an incredibly bumpy ride. Our Navy has fewer ships than at any point since before WWII, we're sinking way too much into useless Littoral Combat Ships that are basically the F-35 of watercraft, and meanwhile the useful ships of the fleet aren't getting any younger. We only have 10 aircraft carriers, when we should have 14. The Marine Corps and Army could use new and better rifles than they currently have, and lighter body armor as well. These are all real world issues that are especially important in the era of a newly assertive Russia looking for trouble in Eastern Europe, an emerging China attempting to establish itself as regional hegemon in Asia and the western Pacific, and a middle east in absolute chaos with Iran rapidly closing in on nuclear capability. NASA is a vanity project that occasionally yields some cool results. The military is a force for stability in the world and needs to maintain its superiority over any and all potential rivals.
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You actually believe that nonsense? Let's see...the Middle East was already destroyed long before the US even existed. The US did briefly bring some measure of stability to the region, but since we left Iraq in 2011, it's all gone to hell. Nice try though. Also, the Islamic State (IS or Da'ish) is only called ISIS by idiots.
"Dictating to others how to live" is basically a textbook definition of North Korea and the polar opposite of the US. If you'd actually been educated instead of indoctrinated, you would know this. If the US wanted to nuke North Korea, we would have done it decades ago, back in the Clinton administration when the DPRK started their nuclear program. In reality, it's North Korea, one of the most horrific countries in history, that's fueled by utterly unfounded paranoia about the US and South Korea, mainly because focusing on foreign bogeymen helps the regime shift the focus of their own downtrodden populace away from their own horrendous living conditions. Nobody is threatening Kim Jong-un; Kim is threatening everyone else. But hey, you have to take the side of the best approximation of hell on earth, because you hate America, because reasons.
And when you call people "racist", you demonstrate zero actual arguments. You do showcase your own stupidity, though. Especially when you spell "racist" wrong.
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Epsilon You want to talk about ignorance? Ok. You're being deliberately ignorant here. Like claiming that the US is responsible for the current Islamic Republic in Iran. Or claiming that the US "supported" Saddam Hussein. There's a big difference between backing one side halfheartedly in a war you'd like to see both sides lose and actual "support". But hey, you have your anti-American mythology, and you won't let facts interfere with that!
The US does not by any means dictate how other countries live. We attempt to stop threats like communism and islamism, because of the threats that they create to ourselves and global stability in general. But again, your anti-American mythology is immune to facts. Meanwhile, North Korea is essentially a giant concentration camp that now is brandishing nuclear weapons at the rest of the world. But hey, as long as they hate America, right?
Again, "racist" is a meaningless term used exclusively by idiots. When you claim US generals are "racist", you are demonstrating your utter factual ignorance as well as your general moronic worldview.
Also, what single country in the last 200 odd years has had a MORE positive effect on the world as a whole than the United States?
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Oh you fool. Try reading articles before linking to them. Your first link is about the 1953 coup, not the one that brought in the current regime in Iran. But hey, you don't have to know the difference, because as long as it supports idiotic anti-American mythology, who cares? The second one is all hearsay, which, when you consider Saddam's Ba'athist regime were committed socialists, seems rather counterintuitive, does it not?
So, I guess South Korea and Japan, who are also routinely threatened, don't count? You do realize that you're actually DEFENDING NORTH KOREA, right? That explains a lot.
"Evil" like stopping Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, "evil" like bringing the Soviet Union to its knees without a shot ever being fired? "Evil" like the Marshall Plan rebuilding Europe after the Europeans wrecked it? "Evil" like keeping two thirds of the population of the Korean peninsula out from under the boot of the Kim regime? "Evil" like doing our best to contain communism (you know, actual evil, responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people in the 20th century)? The US is by far the largest force for good in the world. Containing and/or stopping the behavior of bad actors is not "warmongering". There's a reason the past 70 years have basically been the best in human history, and that reason is the United States. The Pax Americana is one of the best things to ever happen to the world, and you can't make a realistic argument against that.
And "racist" is STILL a meaningless term used exclusively by idiots. Don't have an actual argument? Call people RACIST! That'll work.
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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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***** First, learn the difference between your and you're. Because you're wrong basically every time there.
Second, your (correct usage there, second person possessive) understanding of the American Revolution is rather deplorable. Britain wasn't at war with France at the time - that's the War of 1812 you're (correct usage, a contraction of "you are") thinking of. France did get itself involved in our Revolution, and their navy certainly helped our cause, but the fact of the matter is it was Americans, not Frenchmen, who got Cornwallis to surrender at Yorktown, and the French didn't even join for a few years, until they realized our fight was winnable.
Third, Britain DID pick another fight with the US, in 1812. They burned Washington and then were defeated in detail at New Orleans, and ran off.
So yeah, have fun being from the UK's fucked up backwater, and fucking sheep or whatever it is you do for fun.
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Trump is a giant turd who is no better on virtually anything than Clinton is, and on a couple things (healthcare and foreign policy) he's worse. Gary Johnson isn't a great candidate, but I'm voting for him because whether it's Trump or Clinton, I don't want to be responsible for the disaster that will ensue. To think, we had so many great candidates this year - Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio....and we ended up with a semi-literate moron who literally will express five different opinions on one topic in a single day. If you're conservative, Gary Johnson may not be a great candidate, but he's the closest we've got.
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deke edwards No more than I'm giving it to Trump. I don't see Trump as any better than Hillary. I am giving my vote to Gary Johnson, because he is the only candidate who I consider even minimally acceptable. Neither Trump nor Hillary will ever get my vote because neither of them deserve it. I don't want either of them to be president, and I don't think that one is slightly less bad than the other. Both are completely unacceptable. I will vote for Pat Toomey (R) for Senate, although I am not a fan, because he is better than the alternative. If there's a Republican running for the House in my district (questionable), I'll vote for him. But I will never vote for Trump or anyone else who donates hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, is pro-abortion, anti-gun, anti-free speech, anti-NATO and pro-Russian, and disagrees with me on virtually every other issue except immigration (and I don't believe him on that, either).
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phatrides222000 34 isn't too old. The Army National Guard accepts applicants up to 45. The Marine Corps, in theory, only accepts people up to age 29, but you can get waivers, I knew two 31-year-olds at boot camp. I don't know about any of the other services. If you actually want to join the military, quit making excuses and go see a recruiter. If not, then just shut up about it. NO veteran likes hearing the guy who says "I would have joined, but...". It's obnoxious and lame. If you have the balls to join, join, if not, nobody wants to hear about it.
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Snowcold Yeah, I pointed out that you had medieval castles. Those are cool. I actually want to see Chateaux Gaillard, but I don't consider it worth going to France to do so. And there are plenty of castles in good countries like Britain and Germany as well.
I'm guessing that joke has something to do with showers, but it doesn't translate. French is the most obnoxious sounding language I'm aware of, including Arabic.
And there's more to a country than UNESCO world heritage sites. The US has very few of them, because we're a very new country. That you have less than twice as many as us when you have about 2,000 years more history than we do is pretty pathetic though. What we do have are outdoor activities though. While you queers are sitting around in a cafe or a wine bar, we have the chance to go camping or hiking, or go to the range and shoot guns, or go fishing, or whatever. All of those beat sitting at a cafe and smugly discussing how us Anglos are so uncultured.
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Ryan Hall Unprepared? The French had a bigger and arguably more modern army when the Germans invaded. The Germans, who were outnumbered and had smaller tanks with less armor and smaller guns, mopped the floor with them. French armor was surrendering to fuckin motorcycle scouts. And let's not forget the Maginot Line - "this will stop the Germans dead in their tracks unless they do the exact same thing they did last time and come in through the Low Countries".
Then, after their disgraceful performance in the face of invasion, the French willingly collaborated with their occupiers. Vichy French troops fought WITH the Germans in North Africa. The French Resistance was minor and ineffective compared to resistance movements basically everywhere else Hitler occupied.
Then let's talk about since WWII. Algeria, Indochina, the French have suffered humiliating military catastrophes against ragtag militias all over the globe. Their best troops are the foreign legion, who, by the way, AREN'T FRENCHMEN, and even they are little more than a group of competing ethnic prison gangs with some rudimentary infantry training.
Read what Rommel, or presumably any other German (probably any Englishman too) has to say about the French military. It's been a joke ever since Napoleon destroyed the Grand Armee by foolishly invading Russia. Think about it, these faggots lost a war to fuckin Mexico.
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Ryan Hall You mean the "Free French" army that did a lot of massacreing prisoners of war and next to no actual fighting? Yeah, real instrumental.
The French resistance barely existed, and, apart from helping downed Allied airmen get to Spain or Switzerland, did virtually nothing of value. The Dutch, Norwegians, Danes, Poles, Soviets, Yugoslavs, and Greeks were all far more active and far more effective. The Norwegians destroyed a heavy water plant, and set Hitler's nuclear ambitions back to the point where they were never realized. They also sank shipping.
Every country had its collaborators. No country but France sent troops to the German war effort. Had America been invaded, it is likely that the American resistance would have surpassed any and all others, simply because of the proliferation of firearms among Americans, which is essentially unique in the world. An Axis government controlling part of the country with Hitler's blessing is unthinkable.
There's a reason the French have such a bad reputation among English and German speaking peoples. They've earned that reputation. When the supposed best army on earth capitulates to a weaker force in like six weeks after barely putting up a fight, their honor is beshitted, and it would take outstanding service in another major powers war to get it back. Seeing as how the French Army has failed at everything they've attempted since, this is highly unlikely.
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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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kevfoda Homosexualism: Soccer involves men dressed in something very close to Catholic schoolgirl outfits. That's gay. Plus, why is women's soccer a thing, but women's football or women's baseball not? Because soccer is an effeminate sport for Nancy-boys.
The Melodramatic Performances: Pretending to be injured isn't tactics. It's theater (this also goes to the homosexualism point). Watch a football game, you'll see tactics. A soccer game? Not so much.
Score: "Watching people play [soccer] and not just the goals" is just watching men in gay outfits jogging (this also goes back to the homosexualism point). The entire point of team sports is to outscore the opponent. Even then, when other sports are low scoring, it's because of skill, not just because it's a poorly designed game. A low scoring baseball game is masterful pitching. A low scoring football game is an excellent battle of defenses. A low scoring soccer game is just par for the course. Ties are lame.
Worldwide: Americans don't like soccer because we can appreciate the strategy of football, the mechanics and complexity of baseball, and the speed of basketball. Soccer is slow paced, dull, and involves no skill other than running. This is why soccer is popular in shitty third world countries populated by illiterates. You don't need to be able to read a defense or understand different pitches. You just need to jog back and forth. Soccer is a perfect sport for the brain dead.
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kevfoda So much wrong here. Where to begin? Well, we'll start with women's sports. There is no women's football, or baseball. There's softball, a toned down version of baseball played by women (and in bar leagues across America). There is women's basketball, which nobody cares about, and soccer, an effeminate game that's perfect for women's sports.
What tactics are there in soccer? There's no pass or run, no reading the opposing team's plays and adjusting - no plays at all really. Just kicking a ball back and forth. And I don't know where you watch the Super Bowl, but I remember David Tyree's helmet catch after Eli Manning broke like three tackles in 2008, James Harrison's 100yd interception return in 2009, even Tim Krumrie breaking his leg in like 1991 or something. The halftime show is just so wives don't get fed up and make you change the channel.
Baseball doesn't have buzzers. Nice try though. The point of sports is to score more points than the opposing team. You aren't seriously trying to claim that guys jogging around for hours is cerebral, are you?
You may laugh at the idea of masterful pitching, but a pitcher in baseball is the most skilled athlete in any sport. Can you throw a 95mph fastball? Or place a curveball on the outside corner? If you can throw a 95mph fastball, can you slow it down about 10mph to fool a hitter? Of course not. You babble about being too stupid to understand guys jogging around occasionally kicking a ball, and yet you clearly lack the brains to understand a true thinking man's sport. As far as hitting? The best hitters hit about .330. If you can get a hit off major league pitching a third of the time, you're a superstar. It's incredibly hard to do.
As I said, the (third) world likes soccer because it requires nothing to understand, no real skills other than an ability to run, and no equipment besides a ball. Yeah, some African cannibal who thinks that written language is black magic can understand that. So can some Arab who thinks that learning things that aren't the Koran is a sin requiring blood atonement. The infield fly rule or a fake on fourth down are WAY outside their capacity. Soccer? Yeah, they can get that.
And you want to talk about ads? Like the ones all over every soccer jersey on earth?
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kevfoda Hahaha, still no argument. Guys jogging around and sometimes kicking a ball. No score, no action, no skill required other than running, no strategy, just jogging and the occasional theatrical display of effeminate overreaction pretending they're hurt. That's soccer.
Compare this to action, skill, actual finesse (a good curveball requires finesse. Jogging does not), competition...you know, things you see in real sports. Soccer loses hands down. There's a reason why when the yearly football game takes place in London, it always plays to a sold out stadium. Brits who don't even understand the game of football realize it's exciting, far more so than soccer, and they pour in. You can't give away seats at soccer games in America. Americans understand soccer, and we just realize that it's lame. Why would anyone pay money to watch jogging?
Besides the utter banality of soccer and the well established homosexualist tendencies of the game, let's look into the soccer fans. Soccer fans tend to be thugs who show up to games to fight each other and riot. The fact that this nonsense occurs in no other sports is illustrative. Baseball fans go to baseball games because they like baseball. Football fans go to football games because they like football. Soccer fans go to soccer games to riot. Even the fans don't find guys jogging around all that entertaining.
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kevfoda Hahaha now you're so angry you've lost the ability to type coherently. Americans understand soccer. We just don't like it. In America, soccer is a sport for children, because it's non contact, there's no real need to understand any complex rules or plays, and there's usually no scoring. This is also why it's popular in "most of the world", namely shitty third world countries with abysmal literacy rates. Yes, soccer is popular in West Africa, where cannibalism is also popular. Soccer is the game of choice in the Islamic State, a place known for its enlightenment on everything. Why is this? Because these savages couldn't begin to understand baseball or football. No, they need a sport for simpletons. Soccer fits the bill perfectly. In America, we play baseball and football. Japan and South Korea, baseball reigns supreme. Australia, it's rugby and AFL (a game I don't understand). Latin America is divided between soccer and baseball. The east and west Indies both like cricket. But soccer is surely the game of choice in Africa and the Middle East, the assholes of the world.
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kevfoda Yeah, soccer is lame. The reason that NFL football requires players to be three years out of high school is that football is a man's sport. It's rough. People get hurt. 18-year-old kids tend to be smaller than 22-year-olds, the NFL wants to make sure it's only employing grown men to reduce injury risk.
I really don't care how soccer is organized, the game itself is still incredibly lame. However the leagues work, the game itself is still 99% jogging, 1% ball kicking, and usually no scoring. You can organize leagues however much you want for whatever silly reasons, it still doesn't make soccer an interesting or exciting sport.
I think there are two old baseball stadiums left in the US, Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway Park in Boston. These are both supposedly wonderful ballparks, though I've never been to either. The old, famous Yankee stadium was a dump though, and needed to be replaced, historic or not. I'm sure the same can be said of most stadiums that get replaced. As long as the teams don't use taxpayer money to build their new stadiums, I'm fine with it. The fact is, the new baseball stadiums are much nicer than the old ones are. The seating is generally better, with more seats that allow the fans a better view of the game. This is important in baseball. Since soccer fans generally show up to games to fight and riot, and the game itself is relatively unimportant, I can imagine most soccer fans aren't really interested in the quality of the stadium.
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kevfoda They do like real sports in Australia. They have rugby, which is fun as hell to play, even if I don't know all the rules, AFL, which is incomprehensible to me but I had an Australian explain to me once, and football, which they call gridiron. I don't know what "studies" you've read/made up about soccer becoming popular in the US, but it isn't. I know, I live here. Nobody cares about soccer, because we have real sports to care about. And why would anyone watch jogging when a football game was on? Soccer works in the third world, and in Europe where real sports haven't made it yet, but in America, we just find it boring and gay. We have sports here, no need for soccer.
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kevfoda Hahahaha the Huffington Post is a known nutjob website. Good try, but I'd suggest looking into your sources before grabbing the first thing you can find that backs your nonsense up. Soccer has gotten a slight surge in popularity in the US due to third world immigration. Americans still don't care. And I don't understand AFL not due to stupidity, but simply because I've never seen it played. I only know of its existence because some Australian soldiers told me about it 11 years ago when they came to the base I was stationed at. The fact that you think soccer is actually interesting proves a number of things: first, your simple-mindedness. Babies, animals, and other unintelligent beings are intrigued by very simple things like peek-a-boo or a thrown stick. Soccer is much like that. There's no strategy to understand, no complicated plays, just guys in gay outfits jogging back and forth, and occasionally kicking a ball around. For an adult to find that interesting speaks very poorly of that adult's intellect. This is part of the reason why soccer is so popular in countries largely populated by illiterates. There's no infield fly rule to understand, no slant routes, no signalling or calling audibles or what have you. You just run around and kick the ball a couple times, and if someone on the other team comes within a couple yards of you, you fall down and do a big theatrical production pretending to be hurt. This is not an interesting game. It's certainly worse than every other sport with the possible exception of curling, and there's really no reason that it should ever be played by grown men.
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Corentin Naisse I'm not really interested in deactivated firearms (though I'd LOVE to buy a "deactivated" machine gun that just needed a firing pin), what I'm interested in is the restrictions on actual working firearms. First, I don't think that any government has any legitimate need to register any firearms transition. I've bought guns - completely legally, mind you - in private transfers where I give the previous owner cash and he gives me the gun, just like one would buy basically anything else. I live in Pennsylvania, and the state of Pennsylvania has no idea what guns I own, because I don't have to register them. This is a good thing. The state of Pennsylvania has no rational basis to have a list of what guns I own, and the federal government much less so. Something like 40% of Americans own guns, and throughout the overwhelming majority of the country, crime isn't an issue. The places where crime is an issue are also invariably the places with absurd gun laws, like Chicago. Basically, what I'm saying is that because a couple of people did something horrible is no reason to further restrict the rights of all of the decent people in Europe, especially when the issue is that those people should have never been there in the first place. Also, gun bans won't change anything. I guarantee that anyone with the proper motivation can get any weapon under the sun from some former Soviet republic, or from across the Mediterranean. These new laws, like any law, only effect the law abiding. People intent on committing evil deeds will find a way. Murder is illegal in basically every jurisdiction on earth, and yet it still happens regularly. However, it used to be that every free man was expected to own and be familiar with the weapons of his day, whether that be a pike in Switzerland or a longbow in England. This is a good paradigm. Every man should still be familiar with the weapons of his day, and should not require permission from the state to own them. And when that permission comes not from the state itself, but an international superstate, that's far worse. Laws coming from Brussels should never affect anyone outside of the borders of Belgium. The same is true of any country on earth. I don't want laws passed in Brussels or Ottawa or Ankara or Tokyo or London to have anything to do with me, it's bad enough that I have to deal with Washington. Laws that affect the Czechs ought to come out of Prague, written and enacted by Czech legislators, not out of Brussels and written by Germans.
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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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North Korea wouldn't be crazy enough to attack South Korea. They'd lose horribly and they certainly know this. Kim Jong-un is a loudmouth, but he must know that if, for instance, he started lobbing artillery shells at Seoul (which wouldn't be nearly as bad as is generally assumed, because the North Koreans don't have all that much artillery within range of Seoul, their accuracy is atrocious, American/South Korean counterbatteries and aircraft would destroy them in short order, and they simply lack the logistical capacity to get enough ammunition to their gunlines to do catastrophic damage), he'd start seeing American armor rolling over the DMZ and it would start raining JDAMs in Pyongyang. If he launches a nuclear missile, he knows that an American retaliation would obliterate him. Also, the Chinese recently said that they'd stay neutral in any war where North Korea shoots first. Without the Chinese joining in in the last Korean war, North Korea wouldn't exist today. A war between North Korea and the US/South Korea without the PLA doing most of North Korea's fighting would certainly end the same way.
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I had a friend in college, a black guy, who had been stationed in Korea when he was in the Army. He had a Korean wife. I had another friend, a white guy, who had also been stationed in Korea, and he'd had a Korean girlfriend while he was there, but didn't marry her. I was in the Marines, and we don't have anyone stationed permanently in Korea, and so I don't know first hand. I was in Japan, and they didn't seem to have any bigger problem with black Marines than they did with white Marines there, but they didn't like the couple of Korean guys I knew.
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You're only saying this because you've never spent a significant amount of time in prison. I haven't either, but I do know that people are remarkably adaptable, and that prison loses its punitive value after a while as inmates become institutionalized. Life in prison is still life, and while prison inmates don't have the nicest lives, they can still find value in what they have. Death takes that all away. The argument that life sentences are somehow worse than death sentences is disingenuous.
Life sentences are also absurd, and should not be given out in any circumstance. If someone is deemed so horrid that they can never be released into society, they should be put to death, not warehoused indefinitely. I am in favor of taking life sentences off the table entirely and replacing them either with death sentences or with a set number of years (anything more than, say, 15 years should be a death sentence).
Inmates sentenced to life without an option for the death penalty are the ones most at risk to commit more and worse crimes. They have nothing to lose, and can't be given a more severe punishment. If you already have a life sentence and can never get out, what's to stop you from committing even more crime from the inside? Why NOT kill a prison guard or fellow inmate? With condemned inmates, they at least have appeals processes and clemency applications and such, and thus have an incentive not to keep committing violent acts.
The best argument for death sentences over life is the one the prosecutor used in the case of Westley Allan Dodd, a child rapist and serial murderer. "Look what Mr. Dodd likes to do in his free time. Plan child murders. Commit child murders. Relive fantasies about child murders and write about them. With life without parole, two of those things are still available to him."
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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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@ronald8673 It isn't "the closest there is". It isn't even remotely close.
You focus on the uniforms and equipment. These are superficial. You entirely miss the essence of combat - and you couldn't possibly capture it, either.
Combat isn't about what clothes you're wearing, or what equipment you're carrying. It's a real struggle where people are trying to kill each other.
Do you like football? I like football. If you'd ever been in combat, you'd probably be used to football metaphors. Anyway, a good football game is a far better analog of combat than this nonsense you people do. While the stakes are certainly nowhere near the same, football is real people actually trying to impose their will on an opposing force. The stakes are different, the setting and equipment are different, but the element of struggle remains. A football game doesn't have a predetermined outcome like these "battles" you play at. Playing in or even watching a football game is exciting, because you don't know what will happen.
What you're doing is amateur theater. The Germans never win, nobody ever gets hurt, and everyone watching knows exactly what will happen. Contact sports are much more like combat, because they don't follow a narrative, you have to overcome other people trying to stop you to win - there is suspense and struggle involved.
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@1009maple Of course I like titties.
And Onoemaus was Gallic, not African. They got that wrong, which wouldn't be particularly important unless they were trying to create ethnic tensions between the various slaves from different areas - which they did (in reality, I know nothing about what ethnic strife existed or did not exist in Roman slave society, and I doubt that anyone has written anything about it, though it would be interesting). And speaking of that, they made the Carthaginians black, because reasons. That's incorrect as well. It's one thing to reimagine a Gaul as an African when his ethnicity isn't important, but another entirely to misrepresent an entire nationality. They call the character Barca too, like Hannibal and all them. We have plenty of extant statues of Hannibal, we know more or less what he looked like, and it was decidedly not like a dreadlocked black guy - so someone who is presumably a relation of his also shouldn't be.
Also, the "openness of sexuality in that culture" was one of the biggest misrepresentations. The Romans valued chastity in women, and looked down on homosexualism - it was often used as an accusation against political rivals (see Julius Caesar, and the story about Nero "marrying" a slave boy that he thought looked like his dead lover). It's this kind of misrepresentation that makes for atrocious history, because people who don't know better believe it.
The show's creators clearly did very little research, if any at all, and certainly didn't hire any historical advisors - or at least didn't take their advice if they did.
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@1009maple Almost all of that is misleading, if not outright false. Homosexualism was certainly discouraged and considered humiliating - look at the numerous scandalous accusations of it by political rivals. You're misinterpreting scandal (true or not) as common practice. When you hear about Caesar supposedly having relations with some king of somewhere (I don't remember where), you're talking about a slanderous accusation by a political rival, not an unremarkable occurance. You even had an emperor, Elagabalus, whose homosexualism was so scandalous that he was assassinated by his own grandmother.
Women were absolutely expected to remain faithful to their husbands, as they have been in every society ever - without that, you'd have questions about paternity, which people obviously want to avoid. Again, you're taking extraordinary cases that have been written about and acting like they're ordinary. Look at Augustus, and his constant discussion of Roman values, and his dislike of people not living up to them.
Erotically charged objects don't mean anything. Even the Victorians liked nude paintings and sculptures. You did have gods like Priapus who are always depicted with massive erections, but that does nothing to prove the silly myths about everyone constantly fucking each other.
The Romans weren't shy about nudity, but that doesn't translate to being highly promiscuous, especially not to the levels portrayed by Hollywood.
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The idea of women vikings has been thoroughly debunked, and is nothing more than foolishness.
Yes, women in Viking-Age Scandinavia were allowed to hold political power and were surprisingly autonomous compared to women in contemporary cultures.
However, there is literally ZERO evidence of women going on viking raids or fighting.
Sure, a politically powerful woman may have been buried with kingly instruments, including a sword and armor. However, the sagas say nothing about female warriors, the Anglo-Saxon/Frankish/Germanic/any other literate peoples raided by Vikings never mention female warriors (and do mention all manner of "these people are different from us" things).
Most early medieval Scandinavians were not Vikings. "Viking" is a specific term referring to a raider. Týra may be the wife of Þorvald, and Þorvald may be a prodigious raider, warrior, and slaver, but that does not make Týra a Viking herself. She wasn't.
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@TheOtakuPrince Okay, so there's some 9/11 conspiracy theory in that. Cool. It shows where you're coming from - basically that anything you say can be disregarded.
You do realize that "the mujahidin" weren't one single group, right? That there were a number of different mujahidin groups all fighting against the Soviets, and that the US supported some, but by no means all of them. Now, I'm not saying that it was necessarily wise to support any of them, but the idea that we offered blanket support to anyone willing to pick up a rifle and go to Afghanistan is patently false.
Again, your claim that the US "instigates terrorism" is utterly baseless, and shows a deep ignorance of history and geopolitics.
I know that IS used to be al-Qa'ida in Iraq. I spent some time fighting those savages back when they were AQI in Fallujah. We had them beaten, then some bad decisions by the Obama administration allowed them to reorganize. Then we beat them again. What's your point? Trying to blame America for Islamic terrorism is idiotic.
Yeah, the Pakistani government is "fighting the Taliban" by providing them with intelligence and support while telling the US that they're fighting them. The same Pakistani government who claims that they had absolutely zero idea that Usama bin Ladin was living right across the street from their military academy for several years, but made a point of imprisoning the doctor who helped the US find him. Yeah, I'm willing to believe anything they say at face value.
You have no idea what you're talking about. I get it, you don't like America, because reasons. That doesn't make any of your conspiracy nonsense even remotely valid.
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OK, I'm raising the bullshit flag on the US system of government being based on the Iriquois. Based solely on the fact that the Iriquois were limited to New York (the one state NOT to vote for independence, they abstained) and maybe Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Because, you know, representatives from say, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Delaware,Connecticut, and probably Massachusetts wouldn't have been particularly aware of their system of government. Certainly not enough to vote for their own futures based on it. How about considering some common sense before making ridiculous and spectacular claims?
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@beninwarrior4579 You are taking a naive and myopic viewpoint and using an absurdly broad definition of "war crimes" that has nothing to do with reality.
The reality of the matter is that the Empire of Japan needed to be stopped at all costs. They were busy raping and murdering their way through Asia and the Pacific, committing atrocities that appalled the Nazis. Destroying a city like Tokyo, which had significant military, political, and industrial value, was an entirely legitimate strategic aim regardless of the collateral damage.
There was no way with the technology of the era to destroy all the legitimate strategic targets in Tokyo without causing collateral damage. This wasn't like it is today, where one B-2 can fly over and drop a handful of bombs which will all be guided precisely onto preselected targets. That technology didn't exist. If you wanted to destroy all the legitimate targets, you had to destroy everything around them as well.
Your emotional response is misplaced and stems from a lack of understanding of the realities of the war. It isn't "war crimes", it isn't "genocide", it's nowhere even remotely close to equivalent to actual atrocities like the rape of Nanking. It was strategic bombing of a legitimate military target, with a legitimate strategic goal in mind. Stop being willfully stupid.
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@ronald8673 To paraphrase Orwell, being in a minority of one does not make you wrong.
You don't train like they did. You don't have the resources for it. You don't have the men, the land, or the money. You may try your best to replicate it, but you will inherently fail. Do you cut people who don't match the exacting physical standards? Do you cut people for tactical incompetence? Of course not.
The difference between people training for war, people who are heading into a real conflict, where decisions will make the difference between life and death, and people LARPing, is fundamental. When it comes to the battle itself, the difference between what actually happened and what you're doing is the difference between shit and soft serve ice cream. You're all running about and shooting blanks, and that isn't the same as lining up your sights on an actual human being and pulling the trigger to fire a live round at him.
You say that there are always a couple of vets there. I don't deny that. But I do question how representative these vets are of the veteran community as a whole. Because as a veteran myself, I find all of this abhorrent, and my veteran friends all feel the same.
This isn't equivalent to the 75th anniversary of D-day that happened this year. A couple of actual US Army paratroopers dressed in period uniforms jumping with a man in his 90s, in front of the president of the United States, at an otherwise solemn occasion, isn't the same thing. One of my good friends is a US Army paratrooper. He can talk about the Normandy Campaign the way I, as a Marine, can talk about the Guadalcanal Campaign. I know for a fact that he finds these "reenactments" to be little more than vulgar farce. As a man who proudly bears the tradition of the First Marine Division (we don't wear the patches on our uniforms anymore, but that patch means something anyway), the blue diamond with the Southern Cross and the red 1 with GUADALCANAL emblazoned on it, I'd be furious if I saw a bunch of people pretending to be Marines pretending to do the Guadalcanal Campaign - to say nothing of the actual war I've actually fought in.
This "reenactment" nonsense is the one advantage to the relative lack of recognition that the Marine Corps gets. People are more likely to pretend to be the Army in Europe than the Corps in the Pacific. I'm selfishly thankful for that.
I've been asked to describe what combat is like any number of times. The answer that I've settled on is that I say it's like sex - if you haven't done it, you can't appreciate it. I then mention the caveat that in every other regard, it's pretty much the opposite of sex.
And based on that metaphor, I'm gonna say that what you're doing is to combat like a PG-13 sex scene is to the best sex you've ever had in your life.
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Even if some Roman soldiers had settled in China, the genetic evidence of it wouldn't be all that strong. A few dozen, even a few hundred men wouldn't leave all that much of a footprint - especially on a country like China with its massive population. Even assuming that they were all able to breed (which is by no means a sure thing, considering that they would have seemed very strange, and not necessarily attractive, to Chinese women) it wasn't like there was a continuing influx of Europeans into China. It was one small group, Roman genes would have been stepped on heavily as everyone else would've been Chinese, and even if the bloodlines still survived (again, by no means certain giving China's history of war, plague, famine, and Mao over the last 2000 years), any surviving genes would be so heavily buried as to be easily overlooked.
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This kid was dumb for being there in the first place. It was a bad idea, and he ought to have known better. That being said, from everything I've seen, it looks like clear cut self defense. The 1st degree murder charge won't stick no matter what, he was only charged with that to try and get a plea deal. It IS possible that they could get 2nd degree murder/1st degree manslaughter on the theory of reckless/negligent behavior in showing up with a rifle to begin with - if I was prosecuting him (well, if it was me, I'd drop the charges...), I'd argue that his conduct in showing up armed to an already tense situation that he didn't need to be at amounts to reckless conduct, and people ended up dead, hence second degree murder under the depraved heart theory.
However, if he has a good lawyer - and he'll get one, it looks like a number of pro-2A groups are gonna shell out for a good defense attorney - he should get off scot free. There seems to be a lot of evidence that (1) he was there with good, if misguided intentions, that (2) he did not initiate the altercation, (3) that whether or not he had a duty to retreat (I don't know Wisconsin law), he certainly attempted to retreat, and (4) he had reason to fear for his life before he opened fire.
This looks like prosecutorial overreach for political reasons at best. I hope that after the charges are dismissed with prejudice, he sues the city and collects big time.
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As for smoked malt, you absolutely can obtain the exact same effect with wood. The difference is how the grain is exposed to the smoke, and not what material you are burning. I have used oak smoked, beech smoked, cherry smoked, and mesquite smoked malts in various beers I've brewed, either at home or professionally. If you look at local brewing traditions, Bamberg, Germany is famous for its Rauchbier, or smoked beers. The Baltic region and Scandinavia are also known for using smoked malts in traditional brewing, all using woodsmoke, and the Polish Grodziskie and German Lichtenhainer are similar styles of smoked wheat beer. I tend to dislike peat smoked malt, but am a huge fan of wood smoked malts.
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The difference was that these people trained and conditioned for it their entire lives. Training and conditioning are extremely important.
I was in the US Marine Corps. I was extremely well trained and extremely well conditioned. I went to war in Iraq, which is disgustingly hot during the summer - well over 120 on most days. While the armor I wore there was neither metal nor fully encasing as 15th century medieval armor was, it was still heavy and didn't breathe at all. That was about 14 years ago. If you put me in the same environment in the same equipment now, over a decade after having left the Corps, I'd probably drop dead. But at the time, I could bear it, because I was trained and conditioned to do so. It was always miserable, it never got anywhere approaching comfortable, and the helmet that I wore there, which I still have, has salt stains on the liner from the sweat.
There are other tricks as well, besides just conditioning and training. A good one having something wet wrapped around your neck - this cools the carotid arteries and thus the blood flowing into the brain, and can make a very big difference. I wouldn't be surprised if people back in the middle ages figured this out as well, and it seems to me that it would be easy enough to do even in armor (the flak jackets we wore had a high armored collar, and this didn't hinder it). Of course, drinking lots and lots of water is also key.
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@jvleasure The battles themselves are facially ridiculous. Until they start shooting live rounds, it's never going to be anywhere close to the reality of war.
As for the other stuff, the "what songs they sang, what they joked about" bits, I think it still misses the mark. First, though the songs change (when I was in Iraq, the most popular song in my unit was "Sittin at a Bar" by Rehab), I imagine the jokes are largely the same dating back to the Roman legions. The food changes, but has been consistently bad since forever. Though I've heard MREs are better than the old C-rations.
What they talked about? They talked about back home. Girlfriends, stories of shit they did as teenagers, etc. Whether they banged out some broad or gained carnal knowledge of a comely lass is more superficiality. They argued about pointless shit, like the proper way to pronounce various words that are pronounced differently in different regions (whether soda is called soda or pop was something that we could spend an entire day arguing about), which region has the best food (food is often a topic of conversation), and similar "my hometown/city/state/region is better than yours" nonsense. They bitched about their superiors, and told stories about the dumb shit that they'd seen them do.
Pretty much, soldiers are soldiers. If I was magically transported back in time and landed with the Continental Army in 1778, the clothes would be different, the slang would be different, and they'd be smoking clay pipes instead of Marlboro Reds, but I guarantee I'd fit in and be able to relate in about five minutes.
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Some asshole comm guy in my battalion lost a CYZ-10, which is some kind of thing for encrypting radios, in Iraq. So we fuckin police called all of al-Anbar province looking for the goddamn thing, and of course we never found it. Anyway, shortly afterwards I had post, and they made this douchebag corporal the permanent COG because it's pretty much impossible to dick it up, and he was giving us all a pre-post brief on how important the CYZ-10 was in the douchiest way imaginable, sounding all grave and dramatic and shit and saying nonsense like "if you have the CYZ-10 and your rifle hanging over a cliff...you will drop your rifle" and "if you have to choose between giving up the CYZ-10 and your firstborn child, you will give up the child". When he finished with that nonsense, he was all "alright gents, go on post, don't lose your heads tonight", and so I was all "hey [his name], is it better to lose your head or the CYZ-10?"
Everyone else laughed, he threatened to make me stand two shifts back to back. I got relieved on time just like everyone else.
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The whole "beer was safer than water because it was boiled" thing is also false for another reason: most medieval beer wasn't boiled. Most of the reason that we boil most beers these days is to take advantage of the alpha acids in hops, which were not a particularly common beer ingredient at the time. Boiling also has a couple other advantages, like concentration and caramelization, but isn't at all necessary to create an excellent beer. I've drank and made many no-boil beers that I quite enjoyed. Now, today, when making a no boil beer, we pasteurize it by raising the temperature of the wort to 180° and holding it for 10-15 minutes, but during the medieval period, this would not have been done.
This is not to say that no medieval beer was boiled, some certainly was, but the vast majority of beers consumed by the vast majority of people would not have been.
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In Indo-European languages, there are still only essentially four words for beer. Obviously Beer (Bier, Biere, etc); Ale (Øl), Cerveza, and Pivo. Wherever you go in Europe, whether they speak Romance languages, Germanic languages, or Slavic languages, it's gonna be one of those four words. Spelling and pronunciation might change a bit, but when we talk of a drink made from malted grain and fermented, beer, ale, cerveza, and pivo are what it will be called
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@carlhicksjr8401 A large indictment for sure, but I think it's a fair one.
These reenactments supposedly aim to teach about war. At this they fail in every regard, and do more to hinder understanding than to help. Take, for example, this "assault" on a beach. If you think this gives any notion of what an opposed landing looks like, there's no two ways about it, you're wrong. Yes, the superficial aspects are there - correct outfits and weapons, guys running up a beach. That's where the similarities end. There is a vast, unbridgeable difference between guys running up a beach firing blanks and guys dressed the same way running up a defended beach, with everyone actually trying to kill each other. Having some combat experience myself (in Iraq, nothing near the intensity of an opposed landing), I can tell you that it looks a lot more like kids playing army, only with really nice toys, than it does like war. It's missing literally all of the aspects that make war what it is.
I'm not one to defend Hollywood, but you can get the idea of what an opposed landing, or combat in general, is like a lot better from a well done movie than you can from nonsense like this. The differences are things like special effects, which can replicate things like mortar/artillery impacts, casualties (especially the more gruesome ones), explosions, etc a lot better than can be done with the amateur effects that these people use. Selective camera work can also be used to great effect, focusing on localized sections of the combat rather than trying to give an impression with only a tiny fraction of the men actually involved. And lastly, professional actors who are good at pretending to be other people and showing emotions that they aren't actually feeling help. The landing scene in Saving Private Ryan does far more to convey what combat is like, and specifically what the Normandy landings were like, than these people.
Another huge point, that I touched on before, is that these people may look like soldiers, but they don't act like soldiers. Besides the fact that they're too old and fat, these are guys who are clearly not facing death, clearly not halfway around the world from home, clearly not worried about Jodie fucking their girlfriends or about what will happen tomorrow, or about their douchebag 1stSgt and incompetent lieutenant, or about any of the other things that soldiers worry about. They're guys who, after this is over, are going to change into their regular clothes, get into their Ford Expedition, turn on the air conditioning, and drive home, where they have a shower, a hot meal, and a bed waiting for them. They may all even get together and have a beer first. Basically, these guys are there because they want to be there, and it shows. In an actual war, everyone just wants to go home, only they can't. And that shows as well.
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@carlhicksjr8401 A lot of your defense here seemed to be of the living history aspect rather than the actual "battles". Let me be clear - I don't mind that at all. Especially when it comes to these WWII vehicles, but with the individual equipment as well (though the answer to questions like "why was this commander put in place" and "why was this particular piece of gear issued" are virtually always going to be "because it was his turn" and "because that's who bid lowest and got the government contract". That stuff has value. But when it comes to the "battles", I maintain my position. I think that the necessarily sanitized version of clean, unafraid people pretending to fight only serves to give false impressions and thus to obfuscate and hinder understanding. And I know that if I ever saw a bunch of guys dressed up as Marines in the early-mid 2000s reenacting Fallujah, I'd be offended to the point where I'd step in and give them all an ass-chewing worthy of a 1stSgt who just caught the whole company running a train on his daughter.
Now, I've never been to one of these Civil War reenactments. When I visited the battlefield at Gettysburg a couple years ago, I saw a few guys dressed up as Union soldiers setting up a tent, and payed them no mind. I know that they do that stuff there, and I have a problem with that for an additional reason - any time you have a big event with lots of people milling about, stuff will invariably get dropped and some things will be left behind, no matter how much they try to clean up after themselves. And doing so on the actual battlefield risks their detritus being mixed with that of the actual soldiers from the actual battle. Is that period appropriate button on Little Round Top left by the 20th Maine, or by someone pretending to be a member of the 20th Maine 150 years later? I think that that does everyone a disservice.
Also, and this is less germane to WWII than to the Civil War, but what happens when you're done charging, when you actually get there? You obviously aren't going to be firing blanks in each other's faces at point blank range for safety reasons, much less stabbing each other with bayonets or trying to crack skulls with the butt of a musket. What is it, a little "clash" where people pretend to fight? "Hey Jimmy, you're totally dead now, I just got you with my bayonet" "bullshit Mike, you know I got you first" "Ow, dammit Tim, that was too hard, that hurt" "Oh shit, I'm sorry, I'll buy you a beer afterwards".
When I was walking around at Gettysburg, I developed a deep respect for the men who fought there on both sides - especially for the Confederates who attacked what were essentially unassailable positions. I walked up Little Round Top where they would have, and it wasn't the world's easiest stroll when I was going at my own pace and had only tourists at the top - and I could only try, and fail, to imagine what it would have been like running up that hill with musketry pouring down. The fact that men did this - and almost succeeded - amazed me. I don't think that guys pretending to do it, pretending to shoot each other down as they charged or defended, would help anyone understand that. I think it would give a diminished understanding - the idea that "that isn't so bad". And I think the idea that "this isn't so bad" dishonors the memory of the men who charged up that hill - and the men who defended it. Because as hard as that charge must've been, I can't imagine what it was like for the defenders when they kept coming despite the musketry. It's that stuff that's important to understanding military history. I don't think that anyone at Gettysburg gave a flying fuck about the Union or slavery or any of that other stuff, certainly not during the fighting itself.
As a combat veteran, you must know that the experience of combat is very hard to explain to people who haven't experienced it themselves. Basically, I've settled on saying that it's like sex - unless you've done it, you really can't describe it. And I think for far too many people, these reenactments give a very false impression of what combat is like.
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@carlhicksjr8401 But you aren't humanizing the battle. If you want to do that, listen to stories from the veterans of that battle while we still can. Record those stories for posterity. Find pictures and basic biographical information about men who died there. You know what would humanize it a lot more than some asshole in a costume pretending to shoot some other asshole in a costume? A portrait of PFC Smith from Butte, Montana or Des Moines, Iowa or some other place, who joined the Army at age 17, trained for war, and was killed within five minutes of landing. Real stories of real people - not a bunch of assholes in costumes running around shooting fake guns at each other.
It doesn't matter that it's "exciting", it's doing the exact opposite of your stated goal. What you're in these "battles" is the equivalent of a porno movie without sex scenes - entirely pointless and not at all a reasonable example of what you are attempting to show.
The essense of combat is not what clothes the belligerents are wearing or what equipment they're carrying or anything like that. The essense of combat is extreme, life or death struggle. The essense of combat is violence - these people are trying to kill each other.
The "confusion" here just stems from fools with no military training not knowing what it is they're doing. The confusion of combat is very, very different - changed objectives, unclear chains of command due to casualties, terror, etc. It isn't the same.
A demonstration of vehicles and equipment and whatnot, along with presentation somehow or other of actual stories from actual men who fought, has historical value. If you have to dress up in costumes to do it, fine - just try not to look like a complete bag of dicks (a lot of these reenactors look like complete bags of unwashed dicks). This running around pretending to fight a battle has no educational value of any kind, and amounts to mockery of the men who actually fought these battles.
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We don't have "great" trains in this country because we have decent quality of life and can afford our own vehicles. Taking a train from Philadelphia to New York is a real nuisance. It takes about three hours, and it's often packed with people, who often spend their time on the train misbehaving to their best ability, shouting and generally being inconsiderate cretins. It costs about $24. Or, I could drive. It costs about the same - and I drive a truck that doesn't get great gas mileage - but I'm in my own vehicle, if I want to listen to music or whatever, I can, and I don't have to hear anyone else's, and if I need to take a piss or get a bottle of water or whatever on the way, I can do so no problem. I don't have to sit next to someone with questionable hygiene, I don't have to hear the banal conversations of boring people....there are no real disadvantages. And, the drive takes about two hours, barring heavy traffic, which I can usually avoid. That's an hour LESS than the train. France and Germany have "great" trains because gas in absurdly expensive and people can't afford to drive. If Europeans owned vehicles at anything near the rate Americans do, they'd ditch trains too.
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EnjoyFirefighting - International Emergency Response Videos In Germany? Germany is a very small country compared to the US, and significantly more densely populated. Of course trains go everywhere, there are a lot fewer places to go to. Also, gas is absurdly expensive there. I haven't been to Germany in a while, but last time I was there, gas cost the same per liter that it did per gallon (slightly less than four liters) in the US. If I had to pay 4x what I do for gas here, I'd probably take a train too. Here, the trains mostly don't have bathrooms or food for sale, and assuming normal traffic, they take longer, and they rarely put you within walking distance of anything. If I want to go from Philadelphia to New York, it's over four hours by train vs about two hours driving. And when I drive, there's no screeching lowlives that are standard on any train in the US. Trains and buses in the US are only useful for commuting from suburbs to cities, and not even always in that case. When I visit friends and family from out of state, or go to my plot of land in rural upstate NY, driving is the only realistic option.
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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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MartyrX Uh, Churchill was a soldier for quite a while, and fought various people in India and Africa (and Europe). Using words that are politically incorrect a hundred years later as "proof" of anything is entirely disingenuous and you should be ashamed of yourself for even making that attempt.
Putting down armed uprisings in Africa isn't "genocide".
The Bengal famine was caused by a variety of factors, none of which Churchill had any control over.
Your argument, such as it is, boils down to "he said some mean things about people from other countries". And for the sake of that, you're willing to dismiss his myriad contributions to mankind.
As for Thatcher, yes, her privatization of large swaths of the economy caused temporary turmoil. It is also the reason that Britain isn't like Greece right now. The fact is that a free market economy is far better for prosperity and decent living conditions for as many people as possible than a command economy. Thatcher recognized that when many in Britain did not. She also, along with US President Reagan and Pope John Paul II, is one of the three world leaders who were able to apply pressure to the Soviet Union that aided in their eventual collapse - which of course was an unequivocal good thing for millions of people under the communist boot.
You don't know what you're talking about, please try and educate yourself on some basic 20th century history. These things matter.
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Japanese ship naming conventions are atrocious. I don't remember if it was Shokaku or Zuikaku, but one of those names means "auspicious crane". That's a horrid name. A lot of the other ships have kinda faggy sounding poetic names along those lines. Then again, we're talking about the nation which builds what amounts to a suicide cruise missile and names it ohka, or "cherry blossom" Yeah. Put a rocket motor and wings on a 2000lb bomb, add a pilot, and then name the thing after a pink flower. Only in Japan.
The British are the best in the world at naming ships, hands down. This was true in WWII and today. The most appropriately named naval vessel in the world is the Vanguard class missile submarine HMS Vengeance - the perfect name for a second strike doomsday weapon. The latest Royal Navy carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, seem to have missed out on this tradition of solid names, and gone for the more pedestrian "name ships after people" route, which is a bit of a shame.
The US Navy had one carrier with a Royal Navy-style name, that was still the best we've ever used - USS Intrepid. Far better than the usual American naval tradition of naming carriers after people. Intrepid was apparently a bad luck ship, and is now a museum in New York, that I visited several times as a child. Enterprise is a US Navy legacy name which keeps popping up, and isn't bad (CVN-80, a Ford class carrier under construction now, is slated to be named Enterprise, the third carrier by that name), but the British are better at the whole concept of naming naval vessels than the US is. Our WWII submarines named after fish thing was kinda cool sometimes (USS Barracuda is a cool name. USS Pogy is not), but we seem to have gotten away from that and gone to the boring "name ships after places" model.
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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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Yeah, this is mostly bullshit. WP is used as illumination, smoke, and marking for other ordnance.
It's 100% true, I don't want that shit touching my skin, but if it does, you throw mud on it and go to any medical professional.
I was in Fallujah, I've kicked over more clumps of Willie Pete than I can count, I know what the difference between offensive ordnance and flares looks like, and quite frankly, the "outrage" over WP is borne entirely out of ignorance.
If artillery is firing WP, it's for an illumination mission. If you're lucky, that's all they shoot. Because if they're just providing light for the infantry, hey, cool. But if they're providing light for an FO who is calling in a REAL artillery mission, yeah, THEN you can start crying. Cause when that FO says "fire for effect", well, you don't want to be there.
I never liked the arty guys, used to get in fights with them and shit. Then I heard them firing a mission when I was trying to sleep about a mile away. Those guns shook the ground. Arty is fucking cool.
But yeah. Willie Pete isn't an actual weapon, stop crying about it, stop being a faggot.
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@mirjanbouma Atheism is the belief that there is no God. It is an inherently nihilistic belief, that necessarily implies that there is no meaning to life, and nothing larger than ourselves. And without meaning, without something larger than ourselves, we have no moral backstop, no reason not to be horrible.
It is true that any religion you can find can be twisted into a rationale for being horrible, and that Islam specifically is synonymous with atrocity. But religion is also responsible for so much of the good in the world, for charity and resistance to evil and love for our fellow man. Atheism, on the other hand, offers us none of the positives of religion, and with the negatives amplified horribly.
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@Sparks127 That's a bit different. I forget what they call it, "experimental archeology" or something like that. Trying to figure out how people did things based on relatively limited information. Plus, I kinda have to admit, whacking people with swords looks like a lot of fun.
That being said, while figuring out the armor and equipment is pretty cool, and hitting people with swords is cool and looks really fun, when you get a bunch of dudes in chainmail "reenacting" the battle of Hastings, it's still giving amazingly bad impressions as to what actually happened there.
I don't know what medieval combat was like - nobody does anymore. And I can't imagine that this is a good analog of it. A lot less projectiles flying about, calm horses, and nobody getting seriously injured, much less killed, are big differences. I think there is a little bit of value in figuring out how to fight with the weapons of the day and such, but it gives, at best, a very incomplete picture.
That's very different from, say, WWII, where we know the tactics, where we know how to shoot a rifle, and shooting blanks at each other teaches us absolutely nothing. A war within living memory, captured on countless reels of film and innumerable photographs, with weapons still in use today (the M2 .50 machine gun is the standard NATO heavy machine gun, the M1911 and Browning Hi-Power pistols are still in use with a number of countries, and the MG3 machine gun, used in a number of European armies, is just the MG42 rechambered in 7.62 NATO), and more memoirs, manuals, after action reports, etc surviving than one could read in a lifetime doesn't require dressing up and pretending to shoot each other to understand. A war fought a millennium ago using weapons and equipment that are obsolete to the point of being all but forgotten, with a fragmentary documentation from the era before the printing press (much less the camera), is a bit different.
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@amerigo88 Vehicles in parades is an entirely different thing. That's preserving historical equipment as opposed to making dubious attempts to portray history. I have zero problem with that, and think it should be encouraged.
Keeping history alive is always commendable. But I don't think that these reenactments do that at all - I think they only serve to give a false example of history. Some kid who doesn't know any better might see this nonsense and think "that's what WWII was like. It doesn't look so bad". And that idea might stick, no matter how much he hears about the Guadalcanal campaign, or the landing on Tarawa, or the Battle of the Bulge. It gives bad ideas that take root in lieu of good ideas.
I think it's a lucky thing for you that Desert Storm reenactments will likely never become a thing - my understanding (though I'm too young to have fought there) is that it was heavily mechanized and that air played a big role in every phase of the conflict, things that make reenactment difficult to impossible. I feel the same way about my own war - the urban fighting in Fallujah is not a good candidate for these reenactors to butcher due to the very nature of urban warfare.
Definitely keep the vehicles and the history alive. If, someday, I get to show my grandkids an old uparmored highback Humvee in a parade, I'd be thrilled, and I'd tell them (heavily sanitized) stories of the times I rolled around al-Anbar province in such a vehicle. But if I see a bunch of clowns in desert MARPAT and Interceptor vests pretending to kick down doors while clowns dressed up as muj pretend to shoot at them, I'd take offense.
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@scottdunkirk6710 Twentynine Palms is the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. When I was there (I got out in 2007), it was home to the 7th Marine Regiment (reinforced) - including 1st Tanks, 3rd LAR, a company of Amtracs, and 3/11, an artillery battalion, as well as a couple of Air Wing and FSSG units and the communications school. It's mainly a training base, mainside is small, but there are like 965 square miles of training ranges, including bombing ranges for aircraft. However, despite the consistent rumors when I was in, there were no manned aircraft stationed there. The Wing was at Miramar, with another base at Yuma, Arizona. There was a drone unit, VMU something, I don't remember the number. And I think there was some other unit that belonged to the Wing but didn't actually fly, but I don't know. I didn't know any Wing guys, everyone mostly just sticks to their own unit, unless you have a friend from boot camp or back home or something.
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@brano13177 I understand that that is your theory. It is also a facially ridiculous theory. To "provide...historical, social, and battlefield contexts...accurate as possible...in a safe, simulated environment" is not a realistic goal. Battlefield contexts and a safe environment are mutually exclusive ideas, full stop.
When people do this satire and call it "reenactment", and claim that it helps them understand history, they are either (1) making thinly veiled excuses to play dress-up, or (2) lying to themselves. Getting a few hundred people with replica guns and uniforms to run around on a beach is not only an absurdly false impression of the Normandy landings, it also strips the landings themselves of the wider context of Operation Overlord, and the even wider context of World War II entirely. It ignores literally all of the feats of intelligence, deception, logistics, and engineering required to pull off such a massive invasion. It ignores the historically large invasion fleets, the temporary ports built to bring in the countless tons of equipment and additional personnel after the initial wave, the modifications done to tanks to allow them to land, etc. It ignores the defenses - the concrete bunkers, the flooded fields, the artillery, etc. It takes one aspect of the invasion - the actual landings - and removes them from all context.
Now, that we've cleared up what it does to context, let's talk about the part that it does show. And how this is the part that transcends bad history and ventures well into the territory of disrespectful to the point of obscenity. You want to reenact a battle, but in a safe environment. The inherent contradiction there ought to be enough to put you off it, but apparently it isn't. So you take the superficial aspects of history - literally clothes and equipment - get those painstakingly correct, and then send people off willy-nilly like children playing army, shooting blanks at each other. This is not, and cannot be, an even remotely accurate portrayal of what a battle is like. It removes all the essence of a battle, the parts that make combat combat. It's equivalent of showing hardcore pornography on network television. If you show hardcore porn on network TV, with the requisite censorship, the people watching will see a very poorly acted story of a repairman going on a call to an unusually attractive housewife. That, obviously, misses the point entirely. And that's what these "reenactments" are - poorly acted amateur theater, without the important scenes.
People who actually value and appreciate history don't mock the men who fought in battles like this. They read books, they visit battlefields, they collect artifacts - some even delve into research of primary sources and write books of their own. I own two rifles that were used in WWII - a Mauser Kar98K made in 1937 in Berlin and captured on the Eastern Front, and an SMLE Rifle No.1 Mk III* manufactured in 1916 which, unfortunately, isn't in as good condition as the Mauser and I don't know nearly as much of the history of. I'm always in the market for more WWII military firearms as well. Now, these aren't the best guns anymore by any means. I could get a Savage that costs less and shoots better, and is in a more readily available (and cheaper) caliber. But I treasure these old rifles for the history behind them. That does not mean that I'm about to dress up as Tommy Atkins of the Royal Fusiliers and pretend I'm in some battle that I wasn't. Nor will I be dressing up as (whatever the German equivalent of Tommy Atkins is) and playing at some other battle. The rifles themselves have history behind them. Some asshole in a costume holding them wouldn't.
People who appreciate and value history wouldn't go so far out of their way to obfuscate history and hinder the understanding of history for the sake of a day of fun. People who honor the men who fought in these battles wouldn't dare satirize them as these people do.
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@gyanko8147 Demonstrating equipment is very different from these fake "battles". I have no problem with that at all, especially when it comes to unfamiliar equipment from ancient/medieval armor to WWII vehicles.
What I have a problem with is the fake battles, which cancel out any historical/educational value the rest of it may have.
When you say "as accurate of an experience as possible", I cringe. Any accuracy involved in these things is entirely superficial. By its very nature, it entirely misses the essence of what combat is. Guys running around dressed in period costumes in more or less the same patterns that the actual soldiers in the battle they're satirizing ran around in misses the point entirely. There isn't a respectful, accurate way of "recreating" battles that could be considered even remotely legal or ethical, to say nothing of "safe". The fact that these farcical "battles" are juxtaposed with some actual historical research only makes them worse - it gives some kind of legitimacy to something that deserves none.
"This is how this piece of gear is used, and this is the story of the campaign that the unit I'm representing was involved in, and....hold on, gotta go....BANG BANG BANG you're dead, Tommy! Nuh uh, you missed me! Dude, I like, totally shot you, quit cheating! Yeah, we'll definitely go get a beer later, but now you're supposed to be dead, 'member?"
It's a bad joke. It's turning history into amateur theater, and sanitizing it so heavily as to give entirely false impressions.
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@gyanko8147 Some movies are bad, this is true. Fury wasn't great. But a battle well done on film does a far better job than reenactors for a number of reasons - First, they have an effects budget. Like, a legit one, not "we'll pop a couple of squibs". It means that they can show things like artillery, air, and most importantly, casualties. Second, that effects budget can be used to either show the proper scale of the battle (though some movies, notably Dunkirk, fail at this) or it can show an extremely localized version, where the scale isn't relevant. Reenactment fails miserably at both of these. Also, the quality of actors is a relevant difference. In a well acted war movie, I believe that the guys on the screen are actual soldiers, not just Hollywood poofs. These reenactors, on the other hand, well, they look like dentists and accountants and various other well-to-do, middle class folks recreating. Basically, it looks more like an alternative to golf than an actual military anything.
Sure, movies will invariably get things wrong. But if well done, they can also get a lot of things very, very right. And frankly, something like the exact manual of arms for the MG42 is significantly less important than the overall look and feel of combat. And you'll likely find that in actual combat use, the exact manual of arms was likely tossed out, and probably never really read in the first place. Based on my own military experience, field manuals and reality are two very, very different things.
As for maps and the written word, this is how people have been understanding battles for thousands of years. We have a good idea of what happened at Actium without building a bunch of replica triremes and crashing about the Mediterranean.
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@ParallelPain Citing "reenactors" (ie adults who still play dress-up) as "evidence" is a sure sign that you're doing something wrong. From what I've seen of those people, they're absolute clowns who could never be mistaken for any type of actual soldier.
That being said, the fact that the Spartan hoplite was an effective soldier is evidence that he trained with his weapons. Your arguments to the contrary are either gross oversimplification of tactics that you don't understand or red herrings - that most casualties occurred during a rout doesn't mean that sloppy and ineffective is a good way to train. You have to get the enemy to rout in the first place, and you do so by being good at fighting.
Furthermore, we don't actually know if the spears were held overhand or underhand, and there seems to be compelling evidence for both. My guess would be that both were used, depending on the situation - which, by the way, would be further evidence of weapons training, as how to employ a given weapon in a given situation requires training.
Basically, you don't offer any actual evidence that they didn't train with weapons. Common sense would dictate that they did, as well as the known fact that they were effective soldiers who managed, for a time, to maintain military hegemony over vast swaths of territory. This would not have happened but for weapons training (in addition to physical conditioning and formation training).
Quite simply, a soldier who is not able to employ his weapons effectively is not going to be very good at fighting. Your dismissal of phalanx warfare as "simple" notwithstanding, this has applied everywhere, throughout history, with zero exceptions - whether you're a hoplite or a legionary or a Balearic slinger or an English archer or Napoleonic grenadier or a modern US Marine. Weapons training is not the be all and end all, but it is an important facet in making an effective soldier.
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@ParallelPain No weapon operation is "intuitive". It doesn't matter what it is. And there isn't a weapon on earth, in all of history, that you can immediately pick up and be able to use effectively, especially against someone who is simultaneously trying to use his own weapons on you.
Right now you are relying on the fallacy that absence of evidence is evidence of absence - we don't have any per se evidence of the otherwise obvious fact that soldiers train with weapons, therefore they didn't.
There are many areas of history where we may lack concrete evidence of things that we know must have been true. This is apparently one of them.
The fact of the matter is that it isn't feasible that the Spartan army did not train with the tools of their trade. The fact that many Greek city states' armies were apparently known for minimal training is not a relevant data point here. The fact that Spartan hegemony didn't last all that long points far more to their whole unsustainable "master race" thing than their military efficacy.
Anyone with any understanding of soldiers, of war, of military history, knows that to be an effective fighter requires a mastery of weapons - whatever those weapons may be. Because despite what you may think, it's never as simple as it looks. Yes, it may be harder to hit someone with a rifle than with a spear. That doesn't mean that hitting someone with a spear - especially when that someone has armor and his own spear that he's trying to hit you with - is something that can be done repeatedly and reliably without training. And training is even more necessary when the fight has come to a scrum, spears have broken, and swords are drawn.
You can continue to deny it all you like, you can continue to present an oversimplistic and frankly silly idea of what you think warfare was like back then, but the fact remains that it is very literally inconceivable that weapons training wasn't a thing.
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mad ass Beer cans are lined. Bottles are better as far as presentation goes - they sure look a lot better, and until recently you couldn't get anything halfway decent in a can (and the best beers are still only available in bottles), but as far as being a good container, cans are better in every way. Bottles, even brown ones, let in light. Light is not something you ever want your beer exposed to. Unlike glass, however, aluminum does not let light in. The same goes with air. Be they corked or crown capped, unless they're dipped in wax, bottles will let some air in - very slowly and in tiny amounts, but some. Cans are airtight. Cans preserve the quality of beer better than bottles do. Then there's other considerations - cans are cheaper than bottles, MUCH lighter, and aren't breakable. You can also pack more of them into a smaller space. These are important factors in a number of situations, from distribution costs (which do get passed on to the consumer) to choosing what beer to take camping, where weight and space matter.
Bottles certainly have a more classy feeling to them, and presentation does matter in beer. But by pouring your beer into the proper glassware, you can eliminate that disparity. And cans are generally a better option in every other way.
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@lkhjsdfg Yeah, you said that before.
I don't believe that you've given the matter any reasonable amount of study, because you ignore the fact that all evidence points to His existence (an agreed upon point amongst all mainstream historians, regardless of religious views), and seem to focus on the holes that exist in the evidence. Holes exist, this is true. We don't know a lot about Jesus from a historical standpoint. We know that he existed, we know that He was baptized, and we know that He was crucified, and our knowledge outside of these three facts is pretty threadbare. But every contemporary account points to these three facts.
You could well be right that the stories about the Virgin Birth and the Miracles and whatnot are exaggerated. That is a reasonable position to take. However, saying that because these stories may not be true, Christ never existed, is akin to saying "Because George Washington never chopped down his father's cherry tree than admitted to it rather than lying, George Washington didn't exist". Legendary exploits are attributed to actual historical figures all the time.
Also, Christianity did not spring up out of nowhere. Yes, it was a couple centuries after the death of Christ that it really caught on, but it was there the whole time. If there was no Christ, how do you explain that? Do you believe that a random group of Jews just made some guy up and started following him?
What argument do you have to make that Christ did not exist? Why do you go against the widely accepted historical version?
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@lkhjsdfg It is virtually universally held that Christ existed. There is no mainstream historical theory to the contrary. That Christ existed, was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate are accepted historical fact. Neither the Romans nor the Jews denied these facts - and both would have had political and religious reasons to deny them.
I get it, you don't buy the miracles, you don't buy that the Gospels are good history. That's fine. What isn't fine is taking the absurd step that "since the Gospels aren't good history, Jesus didn't exist at all". Your statement that if he did exist he would have been a "tiny afroed deranged rabbi" really says all that I need to hear - your alleged belief that Jesus didn't exist is based solely on anti-Christian prejudice. If you look at middle-eastern Jews, they generally don't have afros. That's African blacks. As for the "mentally deranged" bit....well, that just tells us what you think. I don't think that a preacher going around saying things like "love thy neighbor" and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" is mentally deranged, I think that whether or not you believe Jesus was God incarnate, you have to admit that he was at bare minimum a good person.
All of the historical evidence points to Jesus' existence. The contemporary historians, Jews and Romans alike, agree on this point. Modern historians unanimously agree on this point. You shouldn't let your own religious biases warp your view of history.
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@lkhjsdfg Speaking of intellectual honesty, comparing basing a comic book character's looks on an actor who played a hockey player in a movie to exaggerating the deeds of a historical figure does not meet that bar.
Whether or not the Gospels are an accurate depiction of Jesus' life is not relevant. What is relevant is that in the early 1st Century, there was a Jew from Galilee named Jesus (or actually the Aramaic Yeshua), who preached, had disciples, was baptized by John the Baptist, and was then executed on orders of Pontius Pilate. The theology behind his existence is irrelevant and unnecessary to the fact that He actually existed, which is at the level of historical certainty.
It is true that we know little of Jesus' actual life. This is not particularly remarkable. During His life, Jesus was not particularly noteworthy. He was not an influential political figure, He was a (then) minor preacher whose teachings apparently annoyed the Jewish authorities enough to cause the Roman authorities to notice, and to crucify Him as a means of keeping the peace. When you consider how the overwhelming majority of people from that time have completely faded from all memory, it's amazing that we know anything at all.
What we do know of Jesus, however, is compelling evidence that He actually did exist. The baptism and crucifixion are the key facts of Jesus' life that are agreed upon by everyone - Roman, Jew, and Christian. If, as you claim, Jesus was a mythical character, it makes no sense for these events to exist. The idea of baptism, then as now, is the washing away of sin. An imaginary Jesus would not have any sin to wash away, and the fact that the historical one did creates theological problems for Christians, it does nothing to help the story. Likewise, crucifixion was a horrible, slow, painful, and humiliating death. "Our Lord and Savior was humiliated, broken, and tortured to death" is decidedly NOT a selling point for a new religion. Basically, the two facts of Jesus' life that historians are most certain of are the facts that it would be least likely that anyone would make up.
The analogy I used before was a good one. George Washington undisputedly existed. He also certainly did not chop down his father's cherry tree and then confess rather than lie. Richard the Lionheart undisputedly existed as well. He did not ever demonstrate personal displays of strength to Saladin (who he never met in person) or do anything with Robin Hood (who almost certainly did not exist). Great and influential men throughout history have their deeds exaggerated, and have wholely apocryphal deeds attributed to them, this happens all the time. Your claim that Jesus did not exist because you don't believe in the Gospels is akin to saying "George Washington did not chop down his father's cherry tree, therefore he did not exist" or "Richard the Lionheart never was involved with Robin Hood, therefore Richard did not exist". There is no logic to your argument. You are saying that because you do not believe popular stories about a historical figure, that figure did not exist.
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@vanhovemare Europe is tyrannical by American standards, and the quality of life is much lower than in the US. But back when all of Eastern and large portions of Central Europe were socialist, you had inarguable tyranny and terror. Just like in Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, China, the USSR, and literally every other place that has ever tried socialism. There is zero excuse in the 21st century to defend socialism. You have to be either (1) stupid, (2) evil, or (3) both to do so.
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"Republicans were the progressives at the time". Uh, no. Not at all. There were some progressive Republicans (like Teddy Roosevelt, who didn't even go full-blown progressive until after leaving office thank God), and more conservative Republicans like Taft. And there were progressive Democrats as well, like Wilson. Wilson was (arguably) the worst president BECAUSE of his extreme-left progressivism (I would argue that Franklin Roosevelt was the worst president, and that Wilson is probably the second worst. Roosevelt's dictatorial manner, refusal to leave office, his "new deal" policies which continue to cause problems today, his obsequeousness toward Stalin, and his interning Americans in actual concentration camps outstrip Wilson's legacy.) Wilson paved the way for FDR, but FDR was worse in the end.
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@Robbini0 Saying "the entire population of the region at the time" is misleading - when the entire population is three, that doesn't tell you much.
It also doesn't say anything about the Japanese American population at large - how representative were these three of the population at large? Was there anything about them that made them stand out - an especially reasonable question as, as the only three on that particular island, they were already unique in at least that one aspect. They made their choice without any broader community - would they have made the same choice given influence from other Japanese Americans?
It's too small a sample size in too unique a situation to be particularly useful in making any broad generalization.
Also, it's taken alone, without any broader context. How did the rest of the Japanese population of Hawaii react to the bombing? There sure wasn't a lot of cheering and waving the Rising Sun, to be sure.
It's taking an extremely isolated and rather bizarre incident and using that to judge an entire ethnic group. Would you judge all American Jews on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?
You can't judge an entire ethnic group based on an isolated bad act by a small number of members of that group. There is no ideology that comes along with being named Nakamura or whatever. To assume that there is is bad reasoning.
And I know it didn't happen until later, but at least a regiment worth of young men enlisted from those camps. Enlisted in the US Army, to fight for America despite the way we'd treated them. That's thousands of men, certainly a far better population sample than three, and from a broader cross section of the Japanese American population, too. Why not judge all Japanese Americans on these men?
Also, it wasn't as if Japan was are only enemy. How many guys named Meyer and Schmidt and D'Amico and Rossi fought for the US, in every theater - including against other guys named Meyer and Schmidt and D'Amico and Rossi. Why weren't the Meyers and D'Amicos rounded up as well - it wouldn't have made any less sense.
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There's been almost no air-to-air combat over the past 30 years, the US has had a total of ONE air-to-air engagement in the 21st century (a USN Super Hornet shot down a Syrian SU-22 or SU-24 or something, I don't know what weapon it used or what the range was). With external payload, the F-35 loses its entire purpose, which is to be hard to detect on radar. This is a plane that can't run and can't turn, if it can be seen, it's completely useless. That being said, it has an abysmal sortie rate, all manner of maintenance issues, limited all-weather capability - it's generally a bad aircraft. The F-35 is at best an overambitious technology demonstrator in a mediocre airframe, at worst it's completely and utterly useless. It's time to cancel the F-35 project in its entirety, sell off existing aircraft to the British or whoever else will have them, and work on new designs for the Navy and Air Force, and let the Marine Corps buy whichever of those they think suit their needs.
And a fighter/close air support (that's another thing to talk about, by the way) aircraft without an internal gun on two of the three versions? Have they learned no lessons from the past?
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The Soviet entry to the Pacific war was a nonfactor in the Japanese surrender. The USSR was not a threat to the Home Islands in any way - they lacked the ability to project force overseas in any meaningful sense. Stalin only joined the war against Japan when he knew that surrender was imminent, because he wanted a piece of the Japanese empire, which he knew would be treated similarly to Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The idea that the Soviets joining the war somehow influenced the Japanese decision to surrender is revisionist nonsense spouted by Soviet apologists. Japan had just had two cities obliterated with single bombs of unprecedented power. Many of her other cities had been razed by incendiary bombings (the bombing of Tokyo during Operation Meetinghouse caused more destruction and killed more people than either of the atomic bombs did). Japan's navy was at the bottom of the Pacific, her island territories were crawling with Marines, and the population was starving. The Japanese knew exactly what was coming with Operation Downfall, the proposed invasion of the Home Islands (due to Japan's geography, there aren't many choices as to where to stage a massive amphibious landing). These are the reasons Japan surrendered. The fact that the Soviets, a powerful nation on land but with only a token navy and no long range strategic bombers (The Tu-4 "Bull", a Soviet copy of the American B-29, wouldn't enter service until 1949), entered the war wouldn't have been seen as much of a threat to an island nation like Japan.
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@conversationtosaurusrex No, I didn't miss the point. This has nothing to do with going to actual war. Nothing at all. It's significantly less realistic than, for instance, paintball, where at least people are actually shooting at each other. Saying that it's the closest thing to going to war is like saying that climbing a ladder is the closest thing to flying. There are a few superficial similarities, but the differences are far, far greater than the similarities. And the fact that people say "this is the closest thing" defeats any educational advantage that those superficial similarities might have brought.
There is no good "closest thing" to war. War is like nothing else. The closest civilian analog I can think of - which is still nowhere near close - is football. You play a game of giving and taking ground, a physical game where there's a good chance of getting hurt, where the object is to impose your own will on the other team....that's as close as it gets. And even then, the stakes are nowhere near the same, and everyone gets to take a shower and get a hot meal after it's all over.
This nonsense is dressing up and playing army. It's LARPing. Saying that this is at all close to actual war is akin to saying that putting on a suit and sitting at a desk is kinda like being President of the United States.
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@conversationtosaurusrex "The terrain". Camping with your friends for a weekend is not a hardship. If you think it is, you don't understand the very concept of hardship.
This is people having fun outdoors. Lots of people like to do that. It isn't hardship at all. If you think that this is at all the kind of hardships involved in daily military life - much less actual war - you are entirely wrong. This is play. Recreation, not hardship at all. They're all there because they want to be. Nobody will throw them in prison, take away their money, or otherwise make their lives worse if they don't show up. They can leave anytime they want. They're camping out, showing off, pretending, and generally playing. There's no dickhead 1stSgt - maybe someone who pretends to be one, but if he annoys you, you can say "fuck off, Jimmy" and there's nothing he can do about it. There's no dopey incompetent lieutenant giving stupid orders which have the force of law. There's no grueling, repetitive training (or any training at all from the looks of it). They can camp out in tents if they like doing that, or stay at a hotel if they don't. They can eat whatever slop from the "field kitchen" if they want, or they can run off and grab a sandwich - and if they do choose the slop, it's because it's new and adventerous. Hell, most people who don't have to eat MREs on a daily basis actually like them, and I guarantee whatever they're whipping up is better than that shit.
Physicality and being outdoors aren't hardship. They're fun. The aspects of military life that makes military life hard are all entirely absent from these events.
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That plate is TINY. If that's what the British Army is taking to war, someone needs to get on the Ministry of Defense, because that is not acceptable armor. It ought to be big enough to cover most if not all of the vitals, not just the heart.
And indoor shooting ranges suck. Shoot outdoors, the experience is better in every way.
And no, that isn't an AR15. That is a very sad invention of necessity, because British gun laws are draconian and absurd. It looks vaguely like an AR, but the British government has arbitrarily declared that its subjects may not own an actual AR, because they fear a populace of free, armed citizens. It's very sad that this is the case anywhere, and especially so in Britain, the nation where the notion of human rights was born.
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@lancer525 Caesar started out as a cognomen, which was indeed a name (Roman naming conventions involved a praenomen - Gaius - a nomen or family name - Iulius - and a cognomen - Caesar). When Caesar adopted Octavius, he changed his name to Gaius Iulius Caesar Octavianus - making a point to emphasize the connection to Caesar (when Caesar was deified, he added a "Divi Filius" - "son of the divine" to his name). When Octavian became emperor, and changed his name to Augustus, he kept the "Caesar" in there. In fact, as emperor, his name became rather long - he never had a title per se, he just added stuff to his name, including Imperator (emperor). During the principate, all subsequent emperors did more or less the same thing - adding a bunch of stuff, including "Caesar", to their names. Over several centuries, Caesar (and Augustus) developed into titles. And now both are used as names again. Go figure.
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Honestly, your ideas about military recruitment are ridiculous.
I joined the Corps in 2003, when there was a war on, because I wanted to fight. I don't know what the peacetime Marine Corps is like, and I wouldn't want to know. I can't speak to the lesser services, but people join the Marines to go to war.
If there's no war to fight, I get why recruitment is low. People join the Army, Navy, and Air Force to get real skills that work in real life, and go to college and shit. But they do that without serving, too. And people join the Marines to kill people and break things, and that opportunity doesn't exist like it did in my day.
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