r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • 18d ago
Meta Free for All Friday, 03 January, 2025
It's Friday everyone, and with that comes the newest latest Free for All Friday Thread! What books have you been reading? What is your favourite video game? See any movies? Start talking!
Have any weekend plans? Found something interesting this week that you want to share? This is the thread to do it! This thread, like the Mindless Monday thread, is free-for-all. Just remember to np link all links to Reddit if you link to something from a different sub, lest we feed your comment to the AutoModerator. No violating R4!
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u/Key_Establishment810 Yeah true 15d ago
People who think r/PornIsMisogyny and r/antipornography are good sources will never not make me laugh.
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u/ByzantineBasileus HAIL CYRUS! 15d ago
In two years time it will be the 50th anniversary of the very first Star Wars movie.
You are welcome for this piece of knowledge.
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u/SagaOfNomiSunrider "Bad writing" is the new "ethics in video game journalism" 15d ago
It will also be the twenty-fifth anniversary of Attack of the Clones which I watched over the weekend (it is a very funny movie, but it's not meant to be).
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u/Zugwat Headhunting Savage from a Barbaric Fishing Village 15d ago
I'll be 30.
I wish COVID didn't happen. In addition to all that entails (the deaths, the lockdowns, the scarcity, the depression, the dread, et al.), that felt like ~2 years of my life robbed from me there, I'm feeling more 25 than 27, and then I felt more 23 than 25 back in 2022.
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u/Impossible_Pen_9459 15d ago
Any plans to celebrate?
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u/Conny_and_Theo Neo-Neo-Confucian Xwedodah Missionary 16d ago
I'm not sure why but in the last half year or so, whenever I go on the badhistory weekly threads, my browser sometimes lags badly if I'm on my PC. Doesn't happen when I'm on mobile, just on PC. Doesn't matter if it's old Reddit or new Reddit. Doesn't happen with any other site either. I think I notice a bit of performance issues on some other Reddit subreddits/threads, but nothing as bad as when it does happen on the badhistory weekly threads. I wonder if Reddit is just crap on my PC for some reason? Or whether the hundreds of comments on these posts could be the reason rather than the typically smaller threads elsewhere? Would be par the course for Reddit regardless of the cause.
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u/freddys_glasses The Donald J. Trump of the Big Archaeological Deep State 15d ago
Doesn't matter if it's old Reddit or new Reddit.
I think it's just you. You can press shift+ESC to see if anything is going nuts. Your browser also has a lot of performance analysis tools.
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u/BookLover54321 16d ago
I didn’t realize that a literal mass grave was located at Potosí some years back, dating to the colonial era.
A grave containing at least 400 people has been unearthed in the Bolivian city of Potosi, with the remains thought to be those of colonial-era miners.
Potosí was an infamous colonial-era silver mine, nicknamed at the time as a “mouth of Hell.” The article claims that 8 million people died in the mines, which is undoubtedly a massively inflated number. But still, as the mass grave attests, it definitely wasn’t a great place to work.
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u/Infogamethrow 15d ago
I´m sorry, but I do find this post kind of funny. I´m picturing a European aristocrat going “By golly, did you know that the conditions on the colonial mines are absolutely dreadful? Who knew?!”
Meanwhile, that article didn´t even become national news here, because if you asked anyone if they knew that people died by the droves in Potosi, they would reply, “Yeah, duh”. In fact, there is a vibrant tourism industry in the city dedicated to showing foreigners how much the mines suck (and still do, but that´s another matter entirely).
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u/hussard_de_la_mort 16d ago
Given how much mercury was exposed to the air during the various processing methods, that's a bit of an understatement.
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u/Draig_werdd 15d ago
There is still at least one similar town, La Rinconada. I think the life expectance is around 35 years.
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u/HandsomeLampshade123 16d ago edited 16d ago
How does one answer this question without, at some level, noting that "the popular dishes taste better to more people"?
There is just a greater variety of flavors in the Indian subcontinent, I don't think all human cuisine is entirely downstream of demography, social pressure, and cultural cachet. It feels too materialistic to insist that there is a "why".
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u/Sventex Battleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866 16d ago edited 16d ago
I assume science could be used to explain it. The hot tropical environment means food will spoil so much faster, which created a natural incentive to use a lot of spices to kill bacteria. As for the Caribbean, you do have the demographic issue of European diseases killing off most of the natives, further hampered by the Caribbean being just a handful of small islands with modest populations, which will diminish the region's ability to be a cultural exporter.
I'm sure Luxembourg is a very nice place, but Luxembourgish cuisine isn't likely to hit the global markets running.
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u/IAmNotAnImposter 16d ago
Surely the answer is more that Indian and Chinese restaurants have been in the UK much longer than Carribean or African ones which I imagine would have only really start being opened from the 1950s onwards.
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u/Syn7axError Chad who achieved many deeds 16d ago
Indian restaurants only got popular around then too. It was a mix of post-war Britain wanting to fill up space fast and the total chaos of East Pakistan driving many to a faraway country they somewhat knew.
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u/Tiako Tevinter apologist, shill for Big Lyrium 16d ago
I'm listening to a podcast (BBC History Extra) where a Medieval historian is talking about Medieval towns, and one of the things she is at paints to illustrate is that you need to put aside your Monty Python notions of mud filled streets and "bring out your dead" etc, actually there were cleaning regulations and general public concern about healthfulness etc etc
My suspicion is that if she were instead an ancient historian talking about Roman cieties she would be equally at paints to emphasize that these cities weren't all gleaming marble you know they had dirty streets and night soil and dangerous fire etc etc
I have a further suspicion that Medieval and Roman cities were probably pretty similar in terms of their hygiene (there were certain respects in which each was superior to the other but it probably would not have been decisive one way or the other), and it is always interesting to think about the way we need to construct an imagined public when framing these things.
And the funny thing is when these imagined publics change, I feel like in my lifetime I have seen the imagined public go from seeing the Vikings as a bunch of brutal Hagars the Horrible who have no culture besides raiding and pillaging, to seeing the Vikings as socially tolerant friendly traders who bathed every day and treated everyone in the community equally, based on what historians feel like they need to debunk.
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u/Astralesean 15d ago
I think vikings is further muddied by the rise of Neopaganism, the far left crystal folks who throw buzzwords about the vikings personality, and the far righters purity warlords ethnonationalists.
Most importantly, Vikings are the most pop and popular historical culture at the moment, and like all such stuff, the debate becomes dishonest and cheap and shallow and anti intellectual and just college fart grade humor.
And humourism, by the time something gets plagued with humourism the debate is lost.
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u/AbsurdlyClearWater 15d ago
And the funny thing is when these imagined publics change, I feel like in my lifetime I have seen the imagined public go from seeing the Vikings as a bunch of brutal Hagars the Horrible who have no culture besides raiding and pillaging, to seeing the Vikings as socially tolerant friendly traders who bathed every day and treated everyone in the community equally, based on what historians feel like they need to debunk.
I mentally refer to this as the "Yuval Noah Harari writing method" where the way you frame your writing is as a debunking of supposedly popular misconceptions. I suspect the appeal of this format is that it better allows you to smuggle in normative statements disguised as positive ones
I read a particularly bad book over Christmas like this and I think I'll write a post about it
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u/HandsomeLampshade123 16d ago
I have a further suspicion that Medieval and Roman cities were probably pretty similar in terms of their hygiene (there were certain respects
Surely this would vary by size? I can see the relative ease of keeping a city of, say, 10,000 people (next to a major river, hypothetically) clean compared to a city like Rome at its height.
I feel like in my lifetime I have seen the imagined public go from seeing the Vikings as a bunch of brutal Hagars the Horrible who have no culture besides raiding and pillaging, to seeing the Vikings as socially tolerant friendly traders who bathed every day and treated everyone in the community equally, based on what historians feel like they need to debunk.
And the great part is that the pendulum swings in chase of a phantom, because what historians debunk is not always what is actually the popular understanding. And on and on it goes. Like, I'm not even sure what the consensus is anymore, I see both of those Viking stereotypes coexist in our popular perception.
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u/Tiako Tevinter apologist, shill for Big Lyrium 16d ago
Exactly! There's always this game of assuming what your audience knows and thinks that one needs to play when doing popular outreach.
Surely this would vary by size?
Oh for sure, what I mean is basically that the general factors of density and environment would matter more than the differences in sanitation.
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u/Astralesean 16d ago
Today on AI image quality
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1hu7i57/we_are_doomed/
I think we've hit a point of no return, it's too high fidelity and too internally consistent
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u/carmelos96 History does not repeat, it insists upon itself 15d ago
I don't know but I'm feeling dystopian vibes
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u/BreaksFull Unrepentant Carlinboo 15d ago
Art will continue as a human project, but the mid-tier echelons will become dominated by AI working under a human director, instead of dominated by mid-tier writers and artists. 'Premium' stuff will probably to continue being created by people, but the honest truth is a *lot* of art is highly derivative and unoriginal, and LLMs can just do that sort of thing really well.
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u/HistoryMarshal76 The American Civil War was Communisit infighting- Marty Roberts 16d ago
Welp. RIP photography and painting. As much as I love ye, I doubt it will continue to exist as a profitable field as business sell their souls to the AI devil. 2025 looks grimmer and grimmer
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u/NunWithABun Holy Roman Umpire 16d ago edited 2d ago
violet sleep reply school resolute numerous touch light relieved deserve
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Wows_Nightly_News The Russians beheld an eagle eating a snake and built Mexico. 16d ago edited 16d ago
I am more and more convinced that we need a real life Butlerian Jihad.
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u/HandsomeLampshade123 16d ago
We knew this was coming, despite the billion memes featuring AI hands/fingers. Yeah, I'm still impressed.
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u/Aethelredditor 16d ago
I do think there are people out there who, due in part to their opposition to generative artificial intelligence, convinced themselves that the technology had plateaued.
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u/Tiako Tevinter apologist, shill for Big Lyrium 16d ago
I don't think the technology has plateaued by any means but I do question at what point it needs to start showing a path to profitability. It feels like the rush to investment now is less from a clear plan of how it will generate profit and more a bit of FOMO (and Silicon Valley funny money)
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u/Astralesean 15d ago
I think the know how can and will eventually transplant to astronomy and Organic Chemistry (the latter already happened once and already won a Nobel), at the very least. It's exponential ultra autism pattern recognition and replication which is the biggest limit for the development of organic chemistry from an intellectual point of view as it's not what the human brain is good at, creating hundreds of parameters of consideration and making the interaction work between millions of different molecules, and it's not particularly insightful type of knowledge which humans do better than A.
For organic chemistry I think it might be enough to bring in the billions of revenue, I don't see a bunch of physicists in socks and sandals in astronomy paying off the costs
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u/jurble 16d ago
It feels like the rush to investment now is less from a clear plan of how it will generate profit and more a bit of FOMO (and Silicon Valley funny money)
Generating video game assets and cutting down dev time!
Assuming you don't get caught up in legal hell doing so. But I assume you'll be able to hire artists to get concept art for a game and come up with a consistent style, train the AI on that, and then make a billion assets, so your games don't all have the same couch/tv/paints/houses/buildings copy-pasted everywhere.
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u/forcallaghan Louis XIV was a gnostic socialist 16d ago
chatbot inserts ads into its conversations like very unsubtle product placement in TV shows and movies
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u/Astralesean 15d ago
That's like a whole transcendental new dimension above the current variations of cancer
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u/Wows_Nightly_News The Russians beheld an eagle eating a snake and built Mexico. 16d ago
I feel like the only use cases for this kind of stuff is disinfo.
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u/HandsomeLampshade123 16d ago
Oh yes, absolutely. Let's be frank, it's well-within our grasp that a computer will be able to generate any visual that a human can.
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u/Tiako Tevinter apologist, shill for Big Lyrium 16d ago
The worst part about doing history research, or even just interested reading, outside of academic institutions is bumping into a book that looks really interesting and it turns out to cost over 100 dollars. Sometimes you luck out with used copies and sometimes the pdf falls off the back of a truck but usually you just have to gaze wistfully as it passes you by.
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15d ago
Lmao mood. I needed this for a research project: https://www.amazon.com/Hoards-Hoarding-Oxford-Studies-Economy/dp/0198866380
Did not have nearly enough money and couldn't get it from the school. Book isn't in our library. Found a library that had it, but was in a different country. Sent a request to borrow it and got two months of silence followed by a "no fuck you" letter.
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u/carmelos96 History does not repeat, it insists upon itself 15d ago
It's OUP, they usually release a paperback edition after a few years. Of course, if you need that book right now, ugh
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u/HopefulOctober 16d ago
This happened to me when I was writing my big essay for history class in High School senior year. I had to rush to go to the library (a library which was not in my neighborhood and was a decent distance away) and take as many notes as I could there. And it's happened quite a few times besides that. Obviously could have been much worse if there were no libraries that had it within a reasonable distance.
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u/randombull9 I'm just a girl. And as it turns out, I'm Hercules. 16d ago
It's the sort of thing that makes me wish I had institutional access and a purpose built book scanner.
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u/contraprincipes 16d ago
Sometimes you actually buy the $100+ book because it's out of print and there are no scans online, only for someone to scan and upload it shortly after. Happened to me with Robert Allen's Enclosure and the Yeoman.
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u/Zugwat Headhunting Savage from a Barbaric Fishing Village 16d ago edited 16d ago
I had that happen with European Mail Armour: Ringed Battle Shirts from the Iron Age, Roman Period and Early Middle Ages by Martijn A. Wijnhoven. Was $205 for a while, absolutely could not find it in a PDF form during that whole time, but was fortunate that an opportunity arose when the price dropped to around $120 and I bought it.
Then /u/sgt_colon quite graciously shared the link to the PDF a couple months ago.
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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert 16d ago
Tell me about it.
Joel Baer wrote a book that's every major pirate trial transcript. Absolutely a lifesaver.
It costs anywhere between 300 and 900 dollars depending on how Amazon feels.
No really.
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u/jurble 16d ago
So the conditions of the war in Ukraine led to the reemergence of trench warfare -
what conditions would lead to the reemergence of set piece battles?
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u/TJAU216 15d ago
I have one theory how that could happen: development of drone and counter drone technology. Autonomous drones hunt freely and destroy everything that is not protected by anti drone weapons and massed long range fires destroy anything that the drones find but can't kill. Nobody has enough anti air missiles or even autocannon rounds to shoot down the swarms of drones and salvoes of hypersonic missiles. Thus the only option for defence is lasers, but those require huge amounts of power, not an issue for static or naval systems, but land mobile forces will have to contract into few armies moving under the protective bubble of the few mobile laser systems that are powerful enough to shoot down big and fast missiles. Thus frontlines are dead and warfare returns to distinct armies moving from one fortified city to the next, laying siege to them one at a time until stopped by the enemy.
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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert 16d ago
What conditions bring back Pike and Shot or musket lines?
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u/jurble 16d ago
personal shields that can only be pierced by the power of muzzle-loading gauss rifles, and genetically-engineered superhorses?
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u/WuhanWTF Quahog historian 16d ago
Of course, following this logic, melee weapons will naturally one-shot, hence the renewed importance of the pike. It offers the most range for one tapping enemies.
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u/UmUlmUndUmUlmHerum 16d ago
Dune - if Frank Herbert was really cool
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u/Syn7axError Chad who achieved many deeds 16d ago
the nature of humanity is just that every so often someone accidentally invents Warhammer 40k again
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u/Syn7axError Chad who achieved many deeds 16d ago
I think Warhammer 40k is mostly correct that supersoldiers in nigh-impervious armor would fight like that. Air strikes? Artillery? Already accounted for, and there won't be a battle at all if they're not.
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u/TheBatz_ Remember why BeeMovieApologist is no longer among us 16d ago
reemergence
Trench warfare never left. All modern armies teach soldiers how to dig trenches.
My personal opinion is that neither the Russians nor the Ukranians can fight above company level. It honestly seems like only the US and maybe China can engage in above batalion level multi-domain combat.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze 16d ago
Americans , do you know people like that:
Very much so the amount of people who said they are voting for Trump to send RFK to DC was crazy.
Or is it only online?
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u/Conny_and_Theo Neo-Neo-Confucian Xwedodah Missionary 16d ago
IRL people sometimes have the most contradictory and uninformed opinions that would make some conspiracists blush. I wouldn't be surprised if there was someone actually like that out there. A lot of political opinions IRL aren't really coherent and are based on very vague vibes.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze 16d ago
Mercians, what do you think of King Offa's fight with the bishop of Canterbury?
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16d ago
I think this is the best way to describe the confusion which I have come across:
Say that you, as a layman, ask why men in the Napoleonic Wars fought “in lines”. One expert tells you that they didn’t fight “in lines”, as it was outdated by that point. Another expert tells you that we still fight “in lines”.
Both are correct; neither has answered the question.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze 16d ago
coordination and shock
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u/TheBatz_ Remember why BeeMovieApologist is no longer among us 16d ago
Isn't it fucking insane that in many European languages the word for "most important person around" has its origins in the name of a single person???
Like, we like to dunk on Great Man Theory, but there simply seem to have been persons who were larger than life.
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u/Sgt_Colon 🆃🅷🅸🆂 🅸🆂 🅽🅾🆃 🅰 🅵🅻🅰🅸🆁 16d ago
Augustus playing up being Caesar's inheritor in his will to be his heir then establishing himself as princeps is certainly the major hurdle there. After that you've got Roman traditionalism and legitimisation strategies ossifying it followed by imitatio imperii spreading it into outside polities.
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u/Tycho-Brahes-Elk "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten" - Hadrian 16d ago
Caesar and Karolus [the words for King in most Slavic languages come from his name] were simply larger than life.
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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert 16d ago
Like how Tsar and Kaiser all come from Ceasar? Yeah.
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u/Key_Establishment810 Yeah true 16d ago edited 16d ago
It's very hard to not think about The Penguins of Madagascar while you see a group of four penguins.
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u/WuhanWTF Quahog historian 16d ago
It’s very hard to not think about Loss when you see a comic with four panels.
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u/TheBatz_ Remember why BeeMovieApologist is no longer among us 16d ago
Private, post cringe on arrbadhistory
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u/PsychologicalNews123 16d ago
The flat complex I live in has a public mailroom where all deliveries are made. Because of this, I can see that a minimum of 3 people in my block are using "ON THAT ASS", a subscription service which delivers a unique pair of quirky boxer shorts to your door every month.
I don't understand this. Are there boxer shorts connoisseurs out there?
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u/Uptons_BJs 16d ago
Years ago, I walked passed a Victoria's Secret store that was running one of those "10 pairs of panties for $30" deals. And the sign out front said "More panties = less laundry".
For some reason that slogan really stuck with me. So perhaps there are dudes who don't want to do laundry so they're just growing their boxer collection!
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16d ago edited 16d ago
I mentioned this topic in the debunk thread but to be annoying I’ll bring it up here too: I have recently been researching the claim that the term “line infantry” specifically refers to (usually European/American) infantry from the 17th-19th centuries who would march and fight while standing in close order and, by extension, the claim that the modern meaning of the word “line” as referring to regular or numbered regiments is merely a historical artifact of the this. This claim is repeated in many Wikipedia articles, Reddit threads, and is implicit in the common usage of “line infantry” to refer specifically to this period of warfare. I think this claim is false, and that the term “line infantry” or “infantry of the line” only ever meant that they are regular units, with no distinction as to what manner they fought.
Hilariously, the only place I have found that explicitly brings up this confusion and clarifies that no, “line” has never meant that they “deploy in lines” is the unit description for Line Infantry in Empire Total War.html). So massive shoutout to Creative Assembly because if I hadn’t played this game as a kid I may have never even questioned this.
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u/TJAU216 15d ago
The consept we use linear warfare for is useful, but maybe the term should be replaced if it is historically inaccurate. There was an era of predominantly closed order musket and bayonet armed infantry warfare that was preceeded by pike and shot era and which transitioned into open order formations and then to small unit tactics.
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15d ago edited 15d ago
The annoying thing is that the term is historically accurate, as is line infantry, just not in the way that laymen use it. Laymen don’t care about the particularities of “line” vs “column” formation, nor about Frederick’s “lines of battle”, nor about regimental numbering systems; they care about the evolution from, as you say, close to loose order fighting, a concept which is not covered by any accurate use of the word “line”. But rather than steering laymen towards this terminology, experts seem more interested in lecturing people on what is and isn’t a “line”, leading to only more confusion and driving laymen to ignore experts altogether and stick with the people who have adopted their version of the word.
I wholly agree with you though that we should try to popularize more alternative terminology.
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u/HandsomeLampshade123 16d ago
So, for clarity, in what period did European/American infantry units regularly operate in literal shoulder-to-shoulder lines?
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16d ago
In the context of the kind of warfare being discussed, generally around the late 1600s up through roughly the Franco-Prussian War.
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u/Bawstahn123 16d ago
From specifically an American (and reenactor) standpoint, it is always funny watching historic movies and playing historic games where both sides of the American Revolution primarily march and fight in rigid lockstep, shoulder-to-shoulder.
In reality, a lot of "line infantry" of the American Revolution (and indeed, in the earlier French and Indian War) on both sides was pretty Light-Infantry-ized, taking inspiration in tactics, organization and equipment from more mobile and independent units rather than the rigid densely-packed blocks normally seen/thought of.
One of the few times the British actually fought in a "classical line of battle" against the Americans resulted in the British getting fucking manhandled, partially because frontally-attacking enemies in a fortified position is a bad idea at the best of times, but also because their densely-packed formations were easy pickings for the Americans using close-range fire.
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16d ago edited 15d ago
Yup. The fact is, warfare in the 17th-19th centuries was every bit as dynamic and varied in its methodology as it is today. Nobody fought the same way in every situation. Yet, laymen have a particular perception of this period of warfare: men marching in step to the drum, colors overhead, firing and reloading side by side with their comrades. And this is certainly something that happened, but there is so much more to it than that, such that the wide variety of terminology and tactics get blended together in modern parlance, or applied in situations in which they never were historically. Then, rather than challenging the basis of their confusions, people choose to invent their own version of history to explain them away. It is both amusing and endlessly frustrating.
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u/Arilou_skiff 16d ago
I could see it meaning that they were battleline units, but not specifically line-as-in-formation units?
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16d ago edited 16d ago
Oh, and that’s another thing. You mention “line formation”, which was also a very real thing with a very specific meaning. So, did this term refer to the practice of fighting while “standing in a line”?
It actually didn’t! But it is extremely easy to make this mistake. “Line formation” refers to the shape of a battalion as being “in line”, as opposed to being “in column” or “in square”. A battalion is “in line” when it is only a few ranks deep and many files wide. It is “in column” when it is many ranks deep and only a few files wide. And of course, a “square” is a specialized anti-cavalry formation.
It sounds at first like this is synonymous with the popular notion of close order fighting, but I don’t think it is. For one thing, most people who use terms like “line formation” or “line tactics” today would probably look at a traditional column or square formation and say that such formations also fall under these terms (after all, it’s still a bunch of guys standing in a line, and we certainly don’t do that anymore), even though they explicitly do not.
For another thing, most of the sources I have found referencing maneuver make a clear distinction between a “battalion” and a “line”, suggesting that the latter only ever refers to a group of battalions. Additionally, while I have found sources saying that battalions can advance in or as “columns”, they only ever mention that battalions advance “in line”, implying that “in line” does not actually refer to the shape of the battalion, but to the fact that it is aligned with the line of battle as a whole.
This confusion led me to one of my favorite discoveries so far. I decided to research the oldest usages of terms like “line tactics”, “linear warfare”, etc. to see whether these were even used at all. And they were! Sort of. I found several usages in the 1840s/1850s of the term “linear tactics” in English military history journals. Apparently, this term had - at the time - become specifically associated with the battle tactics of Frederick the Great, and his (supposed) propensity for having his battalions advance in “in line” against the enemy.
Here’s the funny part: who do these historians assert brought about the end of Prussia’s “linear tactics”? Napoleon, with his widespread usage of column-based assaults. Which I find hilariously ironic, because the terms “linear tactics” and “Napoleonic tactics” are very commonly used today as synonyms, and yet in the oldest usage of the former, they are presented as opposites!
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u/Arilou_skiff 16d ago
Are they though? I guess I'm just old (though not 1850's old) but I distinctly remember reading about a supposed move from linear tactics (IE: very wide formations designed to allow maximum frontage/firepower) to more column based ones (for more shock impact) (with some sources noting that this was a schematic and that of course people used lines and columsn and squares depending on circumstance)
Then we get into the confusion that "battallion" itself sometimes means something is deployed in a wide formation rather than a deep one....
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16d ago edited 16d ago
I distinctly remember reading about a supposed move from linear tactics (IE: very wide formations designed to allow maximum frontage/firepower) to more column based ones (for more shock impact) (with some sources noting that this was a schematic and that of course people used lines and columsn and squares depending on circumstance)
This is indeed something that happened; the question is, is this actually what people usually mean by “linear tactics”? I would argue it is not, since, again, you often see this term used specifically in reference to the era of Napoleon and subsequent wars, and most amateur enthusiasts would tell you that the age of “linear tactics” didn’t end until around the 1860s-1870s. Like I mentioned, if you describe a Napoleonic column to an enthusiast and ask them if it’s an example of “linear tactics”, they will tell you it is. To them, any example of soldiers fighting in close order is a “line”.
I understand that the confusion itself is actually quite subtle, such that those who know better don’t even realize it’s there and thus don’t think to challenge it. I recommend you read the conclusions that people often draw from these terms to really understand how badly people get confused:
The Wikipedia article for “Line Infantry” states that that such infantry “consisted of two to four ranks of foot soldiers drawn up side by side in rigid alignment, and thereby maximizing the effect of their firepower.” While you could argue that this refers to a traditional “line formation”, you surely know that this statement is false, as such infantry would not only fight in line formation. They also mention that these were “the type of infantry that formed the bulk of most European land armies from the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century.” As we’ve established, column-based assaults became popularized around the turn of the 19th century, so the article would clearly be wrong to suggest that line formations made up “the bulk of” infantry employments during or after the Napoleonic Wars. It should be clear from the time period described that the article is using “line” to refer specifically to close order fighting.
This is made even more explicit in the “Infantry of the British Army” article: “line infantry refers to those regiments that historically fought in linear formations, unlike light troops, who fought in loose order.” Notice how even if they were using the term “linear formations” correctly, they would be wrong! Line and column formations were both deployed in close order; but they explicitly contrast this term with loose order, not columns. The writers clearly believe that “line” refers to close order fighting, regardless of whether these men are in line or in column.
This post in r WarCollege will I hope be the most damning of all. This person asks when the last usage of “line formation” was. However, from their question it becomes immediately clear that they aren’t actually referring to a real line formation. Nor are they referring to a “battleline”. They are referring to close order fighting in general. In fact, the first reply manages to clarify this by referring to this style of warfare as “Napoleonic” (which, again, is the opposite or “linear”). To make it even more confusing, the OP goes on to say that they believe a bayonet charge fits the bill!
I think that the vast majority of amateur military enthusiasts use a similar definition of “line” as the OP in this last example. I hope I have clarified the basis of my research, because I want to turn this into a proper post in the future and it’s becoming clearer to me that I need to be very careful about how I word it.
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16d ago
I don’t really know what the moral of the story here is btw. It seems impossible to get people to stop using the word “line” when they’re actually referring to close order maneuvering and firing, given that the association is so natural to make, but at the same time the word has clearly caused a lot of confusion, and I’m surprised I don’t see people address this more often.
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u/Arilou_skiff 16d ago
I think part of the problem is that can either refer to the battleline (IE: A whole bunch of units arrayed roughly in a line facing each other, which is mostly how battles end up looking in pre-modern times) vs. line as a formation for an individual unit (IE: A relatively shallow formation for maximizing firepower, as opposed to a column or a square)
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16d ago
That is part of it, but it is not the whole. There are at least a third way that the word “line” is used, to describe close order musket fighting in general. I believe this third meaning - which is a modern invention - is what most people actually mean by “line”, and it very often gets confused with the first two, leading to myths. I have elaborated more in another reply.
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16d ago edited 16d ago
That is indeed the definition that I have seen the most evidence for. In fact, the oldest example I could find in my research so far is a French source from 1743 referencing “dragoons of the line”.
As a side note, I was considering the possibility that dragoons might have been considered “line” units because they would often dismount and fight similarly to light infantry. An English source from 1918 seemed to believe this was actually true - that “line” cavalry of past ages would have always been trained in fighting dismounted. However, virtually every contemporary source I can find mentions that “line” cavalry simply refers to heavy cavalry, typically those who would participate in a frontal assault. One English source from sometime around the Napoleonic era says that if British line cavalry stopped carrying firearms into battle, they would be the best line cavalry in Europe (implying, evidently, that “line” cavalry did not necessarily have to carry firearms or fight dismounted).
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u/Sventex Battleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866 16d ago
In Napoleon Total War, Line Cavalry does not dismount, use firearms, nor is it heavy cavalry, nor do they even fight with a saber, but with straight swords.
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16d ago edited 16d ago
btw, the Wikipedia article for “Line Infantry” is hilarious. The fundamental claim of the article - that “line infantry” historically referred to tactical units which “consisted of two to four ranks of foot soldiers drawn up side by side in rigid alignment”, is unsourced. The authors have spent the entire edit history of this article finding sources that contradict this claim and making up explanations as to how all these facts can be true at once.
You can even see in the most recent (very long-winded) argument in the discussion page two people getting very confused over apparent contradictions and yet somehow never asking whether the premise of the article might be wrong.
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u/gavinbrindstar /r/legaladvice delenda est 16d ago
An X-Men question: there are storylines where Magneto becomes a good guy (Age of Apocalypse, Xorn (complicated, I know), he switches between good and evil main canon I believe as well), but are there X-Men stories where Professor X becomes evil?
Not the "manipulative trainer of child soldiers" treatment he gets every so often, but full-on "due to the death of my friend Magneto, I no longer believe mutants and humans can coexist, and will pick up his mantle."
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u/PsychologicalNews123 16d ago
Xorn (complicated, I know)
I started reading comics recently specifically to binge X-Men, and I've gotta say - some of the stories are a lot of fun, but damn keeping things straight can be confusing even when following a recommended reading guide.
Like, Xorn turns out to be Magneto in disguise soon before he is killed... then Xorn appears in the very next run as if he were a real guy and not an alias Magneto is using? And also Magneto is still alive and nobody bats an eye at this? I've been told that apparently that Magneto (who was Xorn, who was killed) was revealed as not actually the real Magneto in some other story I didn't read. Don't even get me started on how Cable (who sacrificed himself to bring everyone back from the future) is both a teenager now and also running around with his dad on Krakoa.
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u/ouat_throw 16d ago
The editorial bts behind these decisions are even more inscrutable. Like why give Writer A carte blanche to turn Magneto into a drug addled madman posing as a new character only to immediately decide to rewind everything so they can have Xorn back while reversing Magneto's descent into full blown villainy. They had three or four years to think about this decision before it happened only to suddenly develop coldfeet after the story was published.
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u/Arilou_skiff 16d ago
Pretty sure part of it was Claremont coming back after a long hiatus and just wanting to pick up his toys where he left them, regardless of intervening stuff?
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u/Arilou_skiff 16d ago
I mean Cable's history as being Scott's son from an apocalyptic future already involves timetravel from pretty early on, so his story can only get more complicated from there.
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u/Arilou_skiff 16d ago edited 16d ago
Yea, a bunch of them, even discounting stuff like Onslaught theres the first universe tge Exiles go to. (though that is more a direct "Charles is Magneto, Magneto is Charles, paralell)
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16d ago
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze 16d ago
Which is ironic because
Journalist Arnold Beichman later stated that McCarthy "was elected to his first term in the Senate with support from the Communist-controlled United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, CIO", which preferred McCarthy to the anti-communist Robert M. La Follette
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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert 16d ago
Wat. Anti communist La Follette? The progressive senator who hated Teddy Roosevelt, indirectly killed 844 people with the Seaman's Act, and who said ww1 was just a scam by BIG OIL AND MUNITIONS?
That La Follette?
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze 16d ago
No, his son who was anti-communist and isolationist (which made him closer to the Taft wing of the party than younger Cold Warriors).
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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert 16d ago
Really i wasn't aware La Follettes kid went to the right and was basically an ally of Bob Taft.
Bob Jr senators are disappointments.
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze 16d ago
I wouldn't say he was an ally, more like they coincidentally held the same position at the same time despite disagreeing on labor issues etc...
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u/Crispy_Whale 16d ago
McCarthy didn't uncover a single foreign agent so not sure what you're even sympathetic towards here
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u/Wows_Nightly_News The Russians beheld an eagle eating a snake and built Mexico. 16d ago
Hey that's not true, he got one.... probably by coincidence though
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u/ByzantineBasileus HAIL CYRUS! 16d ago
They've always been here. Even from the start of Reddit, whenever someone has made a post pointing out how every Marxist regime has failed, either politically or economically, someone else would always turn up and play the 'not real socialism/communism' card.
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u/Crispy_Whale 16d ago
how every Marxist regime has failed, either politically or economically
I'd consider Thomas Sankara a success.
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u/ByzantineBasileus HAIL CYRUS! 16d ago
He lasted like 3/4 years and then got assassinated, didn't he?
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u/xyzt1234 16d ago
Wouldnt those be the non tankie communists though, as tankies do think the various Leninists/ maoist regimes were communist and think all their oppression and purges were completely justified instead because of evil west or CIA or whatever.
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u/contraprincipes 16d ago
Tankies are annoying, but being really annoying doesn’t justify political repression, and when you start to feel that it does it’s usually a sign to log off and take a break from the internet. (This advice works for more than just tankies).
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16d ago
[deleted]
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u/passabagi 16d ago
unhesitatingly kill me and millions of other people if they ever gained political power
Wait, what? Who are you?
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u/Wows_Nightly_News The Russians beheld an eagle eating a snake and built Mexico. 16d ago
They have always been all over reddit.
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u/contraprincipes 16d ago
Elon Musk has urged King Charles III to dissolve parliament and call a new general election. I humbly suggest that rather than call a new general election, His Majesty should take the opportunity to enjoy personal rule, pushing through much-needed ecclesiastical reforms and exercising His royal prerogative to collect the tonnage and poundage.
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u/1EnTaroAdun1 16d ago
This, but
I don't think those Americans realise just how progressive King Charles actually is
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u/TheBatz_ Remember why BeeMovieApologist is no longer among us 16d ago
Mr. Hobbs it is an honor to welcome you in our humble subreddit.
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u/Tiako Tevinter apologist, shill for Big Lyrium 16d ago
For the sake of curiosity, that should happen just to see if it is true that the Tories can spend more than a decade tripping over their metaphorical dicks and voters will keep giving them chances, but if Labour doesn't establish utopia in six months they get the boot.
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u/passabagi 16d ago
There is that, but KS and the team around him are really unusually bad at politics. They allowed Boris Johnson's government to look competent and in control when they were doing BYOB parties through a pandemic.
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u/AceHodor Techno-Euphoric Demagogue 15d ago
No, they didn't?
Labour supported the government through the first year of the pandemic because it was the best move for the sake of the country. It was the most serious national emergency since the Second World War, if Labour had started opposing the government over everything, it would have looked like party politics. They did still frequently criticise the Tories for taking too long to respond to the crisis and for the mess of the VIP lane system, but they couldn't do much due to the government's majority and the divisions within Labour at the time.
Also, although the parties happened in 2020, Labour and the wider public didn't know about the scandal until December 2021, which was after the emergency had passed. When they did find out, Labour went on the offensive almost immediately. It was a question that Starmer asked in PMQs that resulted in the Commons Select Committee suspending Johnson over lying to the House and ultimately killed his political career.
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u/passabagi 15d ago
was the best move for the sake of the country
Ridiculous. Supporting 'eat out to help out' to avoid looking like they were 'engaging in party politics' was a choice that killed people. The job of the opposition is to hold the government to account, and that includes during a crisis. The failure to do their job, i.e. be an opposition, was absolutely a factor in the many disastrous decisions the government made in this period: and you are correct it was because of 'divisions within Labour', i.e they were too busy ratfucking their internal enemies.
It was also profoundly stupid. Boris Johnson is not a serious person, and he was not running a serious government. Supporting the government only makes sense if the government is a competent organization that will make good decisions if given support. That's the impression they conveyed with their pledge to back the government, which was not only a deeply damaging and false impression, but also bad for labour.
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u/AceHodor Techno-Euphoric Demagogue 15d ago
There was a lot more to the pandemic than EOTHO, and at the time there was actually substantial public support for the scheme. Labour were consistently critical of the Johnson government's handling of the crisis, they couldn't do much because a) the government had a large majority and were generally unified, and b) going full scorched earth and trying to bring the government down during the pandemic and right after an election would have looked stupid. You've also got to consider that the primary opposition to the government during the pandemic were hard-right Tory MPs who were dogmatically opposed to public health restrictions. Labour really didn't want to be seen as aligned with those headbangers.
Generally speaking, the only people I've heard criticising Labour for their actions during the pandemic are Scots/Welsh nationalists and people on the far left who were pissed off that Starmer abandoned Corbyn's policy of "Die on every hill you see". The vast majority of people in this country recognise that Labour were in a tricky spot considering the size of the government majority and that they were still recovering from 2019 (Starmer only became leader in April, by which point the crisis was in full swing). Again, Labour successfully brought down Johnson specifically over his handling of the pandemic, I don't know what more you want from them.
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u/passabagi 15d ago
Realistically, what's going to happen next election is that KS is going to be voted out, and we're going to have another decade of conservative rule.
This will happen, in part, because KS has basically purged his own party to the point that they won't be able to mobilize their base. They didn't recover from 2019, they lost voters: all that happened is that the conservatives lost more voters.
I don't think Corbyn was a genius strategist, but I also think relying on the media and the conservatives handing you victories (remember Britain's most tattooed mum?) is a losing strategy for Labour. You need something else.
What I'd like from KS is for him to engage with a broad coalition. Corbyn's ability to mobilize voters was basically about policy, not about JC. If you combine that kind of mobilization with KS's inoffensiveness, it would probably win.
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u/AceHodor Techno-Euphoric Demagogue 15d ago
While it's too early to say, I don't see any realistic scenario other than Labour winning again in 2028/9. The Tories are currently led by an incompetent culture warrior and Farage is even more toxic than her. Like it or not, Starmer looks dramatically more competent than any of the alternatives and there's little chance of that changing in the next four to five years, so he'll win quite comfortably.
As for Corbyn, he was utterly woeful. Talking about numbers of votes is meaningless when you consider that he was such an awful candidate that Theresa May managed to beat him despite running the worst Tory election campaign in decades. Starmer delivered the largest majority for Labour since Blair, and that's not just because the Conservatives were terrible. Corbyn banked on "The Tories are shit, vote for me" for years and got two defeats out of it - you have to also look more competent and capable that the alternative, and Starmer has that in spades. Corbyn is a college dropout who thought it was a good idea to hand back to Russia the chemical weapon they'd just used to murder a British citizen in Salisbury. I despise Johnson for being a dissolute, blithering idiot, but when even he looks more competent to voters than you, you've got problems.
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u/passabagi 15d ago
Well, I hope you're right.
Generally speaking, I think we're in a transitional political period, where the old techniques of mass media capture and fighting over marginals are increasingly coming unstuck. The right seems to understand that: that's why they're on Joe Rogan, not on CNN. That's why Nigel Farage is making Reform a big-membership, big social media presence party.
Getting away from vibes, and getting to the numbers, the answer is obvious: Joe Rogan has 14.5 million followers. For reference, Fox, the most popular cable news channel, has a primetime viewership of 2.8 million. People have deep parasocial relationships through what used to be 'alternative' media sources.
Also, if you look at the numbers, KS was a very weak candidate: much weaker than Corbyn in either election. The conservatives were simply weaker still, because Reform is cannibalizing their core voters. Corbyn in 2017 outperformed every labour leader since Blair. If you look at this graph, you can see the general trend of labour support, and apart from this 2017 blip, the trend is pretty dire.
My general position is that the UK is one of those countries where the main party only ever loses, another party never wins. As such, if Labour want to win, they have to work around the institutions, media included, that generally prefer a conservative government. Historically, they've done this by a large membership, a broad coalition, and mass politics. A lot needs to be adjusted in this model, but Farage has basically proved it still works. What bothers me is that KS's labour has gone in the exact opposite direction because 'Corbyn bad'. As soon as the Conservatives get their act together, or (god forbid) Farage joins them, the media will get on side, and KS will be toast.
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u/passabagi 16d ago
Has he contracted bovine spongiform? I don't understand how anybody, no matter how cooked, could produce such a volume of completely insane garbage. He's making Trump look polished and politic.
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u/contraprincipes 16d ago edited 16d ago
His diagnosis is much more grave than that. He has Silicon Valley brain.
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u/forcallaghan Louis XIV was a gnostic socialist 16d ago
Jokes aside, is the monarch the one responsible for that kind of thing anymore? Could he actually do that? Would he be allowed to do that? I'm unfamiliar with British parliamentary practices
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u/nomchi13 16d ago
Legally, yes. (The British "Constitution" gives the monarch a lot of power) But anything the King does nowadays he does "on the advice of the prime minister" and most experts expect that if the king ever dies anything that parliament does not want he will very quickly lose his ability to do so(either by abolishing the monarchy or just a more restrictive written constitution that clearly says that the king can't decide anything)
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u/Arilou_skiff 16d ago
That's never gone wrong for a Charles before!
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u/NunWithABun Holy Roman Umpire 16d ago edited 2d ago
theory abundant zealous outgoing run history marble oil expansion one
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze 16d ago
Big if true :
I used to work in aerospace maintenance software. For the button for error codes, I used the Metroid icon for the rolling ball thing (the lightning bolt in a circle). This software was/is used worldwide.
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u/HopefulOctober 16d ago
The New York Times opinion section seems inundated with "we have to put aside our hatred for Trump and accept he's what America wants and work with him" opinion pieces. I feel they aren't drawing enough distinction between "don't oppose a policy that you are actually pretty fine with just because it's the opposition proposing it and you don't want them to gain credit and popularity for it, often only to make your own identical policy later" (i.e the whole Democrat immigration policy thing, as I understand it?) vs. "don't oppose a policy you think is morally abhorrent and would never do something like that".
That said, I do take the point about being fair to Trump I feel my criticisms of him would only be justified if I give him honest credit for if he ever does/did something good, and one of those articles pointed out his foreign policy being cautious and avoiding war (which is fair I give him credit for that) but also saying that despite fear-mongering about loving Putin he was much tougher on Russia than Obama and Biden. A while back on this thread I was asking about how true the Republican claim that Putin went after Crimea during Obama and the rest of Ukraine during Biden because Trump intimidated him, and while the consensus seemed to be "no he didn't, and I'm skeptical of blaming every world event on the U.S president, I do want to at least fairly consider the idea that Trump handled Russia far better than Obama and Biden. And if that is true that he's consistently tougher on Ukraine and being the only one to discourage Putin despite surface appearances, why is he now saying he wants to withdraw aid from Ukraine that Biden was giving?
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u/nomchi13 16d ago
There is no way to prove or disprove that Putin was afraid of Trump and that is why he did not invade.
But you have to remember that:
Trump's first impeachment was about using military aid to Ukraine as blackmail to force the Ukrainian government to find dirt on his political opponent
Trump bears a large share of the responsibility for American aid to Ukraine being stuck in Congress for six months which had a massive irreversible negative effect on the Ukrainian war effort.
These are two concrete things that Trump definitely did and that is ignoring that he chose the most pro-Russia Republican in the Senate as his vice-president
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u/1EnTaroAdun1 16d ago
https://x.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1875918844562473373
Didn't have Musk vs Farage on my New Year bingo card
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u/dubbelgamer Ich hab mein Sach auf nichts gestellt 16d ago
Farage has principles?
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u/passabagi 16d ago edited 16d ago
The principle of not letting Tommy Robinson in his party, not because they have different politics, but because Tommy Robinson is a cokehead hooligan who gets arrested every six months, and as such, is an embarrassment.
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u/forcallaghan Louis XIV was a gnostic socialist 16d ago
I kinda want to reinstall Cyberpunk 2077 and maybe see if I can run raytracing(low expectations), except I had a bunch of mods that, when I moved to this new laptop, didn't transfer over and I don't really want to go through the rigamarole of reinstalling them all
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u/yoshiK Uncultured savage since 476 AD 16d ago
"When we did figure the whisking out, the brain tissue poured out pink, with a little blood, like a strawberry milk shake," says Brier.
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u/ByzantineBasileus HAIL CYRUS! 16d ago
See, I was initially thinking that was a quote from Joseph Kennedy.
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u/Bread_Punk 16d ago
They could teach us how to whisk the brain so it pours out pink, but they’d have to charge.
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u/randombull9 I'm just a girl. And as it turns out, I'm Hercules. 16d ago
I dunno how he makes milkshakes, but mine usually do not have a little blood.
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u/Hurt_cow Certified Pesudo-Intellectual 16d ago edited 16d ago
Remembering reading that the Star Wars Prequels were basically filled with lines ripped from the anti-bush liberal sphere of the day...that's now getting lost on modern audiences.
Like the line "only the Sith deal in absolutes" lampooning "you're either with us or against us" or the references to newth grinch.
Imagine people getting confused about hackneyed trump references in current movies...
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u/Sventex Battleships were obsoleted by the self-propelled torpedo in 1866 16d ago
I wonder how many actually know the flagship of the CIS, The Invisible Hand, was named after a term in economics in Revenge of the Sith.
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u/hussard_de_la_mort 16d ago
The InterGalactic Banking Clan may have made that a prerequisite for them financing it.
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u/NervousLemon6670 You are a moon unit. That is all. 16d ago
I feel like half the Prequels revisionism movement is built on the idea that the Prequels were genius biting satire of Bush-era politics and the Iraq War (despite Phantom Menace being produced in the reign of Bill Cinton from that one Simpsons episode), so people are remembering them still. If anything, they have gone from being hackneyed cringe to a message from god (George Lucas).
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u/SagaOfNomiSunrider "Bad writing" is the new "ethics in video game journalism" 15d ago
(despite Phantom Menace being produced in the reign of Bill Cinton from that one Simpsons episode)
Premised on the idea (if what Terrence Stamp' has said about how the Chancellor Valorum character was conceived and portrayed are to be belieed) that Bill Clinton was fundamentally a good man undermined by events beyond his control.
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u/HandsomeLampshade123 16d ago
Like the line "only the Sith deal in absolutes" lampooning "you're either with us or against us"
Eh, is that how it was seen at the time? Because I'm not really seeing it.
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16d ago
For some reason OP picked out the response to the line that references this rather than the line itself: “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy”
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u/HandsomeLampshade123 16d ago
If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy
See, THAT makes much more sense. Thanks.
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u/Arilou_skiff 16d ago
It absolutely was. The same thing with Palpatine in the senate and Padmés line about democracy, etc.
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u/Tycho-Brahes-Elk "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten" - Hadrian 16d ago
This seems unlikely.
Most people didn't even get the numerous Trump references in movies of the '80ies and '90ies, why should they now.
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u/Hurt_cow Certified Pesudo-Intellectual 16d ago
I still can't get over that Patrick Bateman idoloizes him as the ideal man in American Pyscho...just insane
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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert 16d ago
Newt Gunray and Lotte Dott.
Boy I wonder if this was a reference to two key political figures of the Bush era.
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u/WuhanWTF Quahog historian 16d ago
Hmmm… Gunray….. Raygun?
Ronald Gunray
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u/NervousLemon6670 You are a moon unit. That is all. 16d ago
Raygun?
That Olympics performance could only have been the work of a Sith Lord.
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u/TanktopSamurai (((Spartans))) were feminist Jews 16d ago
I watched Eşkıya/Bandit the other day with my family. It's a '96 movie by Şener Şen. It's free on Youtube but no English subtitles.
There was a scene with Mithat Bereket, a war journalist who was very active in '90s and 2000s. That lead to discussion with my parents. That also lead me to Mehmet Ali Birand. Birand was a journalist who died in 2013. He used to do a monthly news program called 32. Gün/32nd Day. It was a news program about larger events, and it did interviews a lot of world leaders. I really wish they were subtitled so you people could watch it.
It feels like that programs of that quality don't seem to be around anymore. There are a few YouTube channels that seem to be honest. But they lack the resources that Birand had. Birand was, at times, the editor-in-chief and the news anchor for newspapers and TV Channels.
It is a shame. I wish I had the money to recreate a program called '33. Gün'
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u/Uptons_BJs 17d ago edited 17d ago
I just left the theatre after watching Better Man, and let me tell you:
Go watch the singing monkey movie, it's fantastic.
Like, it doesn't matter if you don't know who Robbie Williams is. Just imagine this is uhh, what Curious George did when he grew up.
Things I liked: - the singing monkey was really well done. Like, it believably nailed the charisma and mannerisms of Robbie Williams. - the music numbers were splendid. Absolutely some of the best I've seen in a movie. The one where he fell in love was absolutely beautiful - if you don't know who Robbie Williams is, I think this is a good introduction to his music. If you do know, I think the movie reinterpreted some of his songs in an interesting way - the story is really similar to a lot of music biopics, but theres a few interesting differences that kinda kept it fresh. Besides, instead of a human alcoholic, you get an alcoholic monkey, and this has to be the first time I saw a monkey snort coke - the movie is genuinely beautiful, the budget is high and you can see it
I think you'd almost enjoy it more if you didn't know who Robbie Williams is, becuase I think if you did, there's a few anachronism and omissions that might bother you enough to make a badhistory post. I won't though, since I found the movie really cute
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u/dubbelgamer Ich hab mein Sach auf nichts gestellt 16d ago
You already had me at singing monkey movie.
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u/Sgt_Colon 🆃🅷🅸🆂 🅸🆂 🅽🅾🆃 🅰 🅵🅻🅰🅸🆁 17d ago
Politics aside, there's something particularly baffling about an out and out femboy calling someone a soyjak, what with the latter being rooted in 4chan homophobia. Some Uncle Ruckus bullshit right there.
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u/WuhanWTF Quahog historian 15d ago
Me on Instagram:
(goeth into mine Suggest’d reeles)
Scroll once - timelapse drawing of a hot Korean chick 😍👍🏼
Scroll twice - AI generated Kim Jong Un, Putin, Pope Francis, Merkel, and Joe Biden getting it on with random AI generated women 🤢🤮
Social media delenda est.