xthetenth

That would be a very good thing to have. It would address a lot of the most obvious ways people end up dead because of guns (kids and stolen guns) to a much better degree than the legislation that's just to feel good about doing something. The tech working or not is a pretty major question though.

If people feel robbed of what they thought they would see, they can GIS tintinnabulum and learn about the fun coincidence of superstitious symbolism that wouldn't be out of place in the Army or Marine Corps and Roman tendencies for being incredibly hugely superstitious.

Amen to that. Leave the inbreeding to anti-rural jokes and the Habsburgs. Under no terms should it be inflicted on unsuspecting animals.

Neat. Cheap and easy animal protein is awesome, and as long as I'm eating meat and not animals I'm on board.

Meat may be murder, but that's even more justification to eat chicken.

I've actually heard it before then but that is not a parallel I thought of. This is pretty fair. I'd bring up that whole "totally stands for scout snipers guys" flag scandal regarding seriously sketchy behavior regarding Nazism, but there's a real difference between recruiting for a peacetime military and recruiting for a wartime military. Warning, a decent fraction of this post is going to be drawing on the experiences from Vietnam through the eighties or so, because I'm pulling in large part from the excellent book Prodigal Soldiers (and I was having problems paying attention during the Iraq and A'stan bit of class so I don't remember them as well. Sorry). The wartime stuff isn't going to map cleanly at all and I'm not even going to try other than to make a point or two about volunteer vs. conscript and a little remark about what having to scrounge up manpower can do. On the other hand, I'd say there's a pretty significant difference in recruiting outlook for a peacetime military for genital waving versus regional contenders for hegemony and the military during a war lasting over a decade that has no meaningful impact on the population of the nation unless they know somebody who's in and is getting to the point where stop-loss orders are becoming problematic, with serious increases before Gates ordered a reduction. First, a conscription system isn't going to get recruits evenly from across the nation's demographics. You start giving draft deferments for things like education and so on and the richer parts of society start becoming progressively (or should I say regressively) less involved in the war. There's also the fact that it's a goal to keep the population insulated from feeling the effects and costs of the war. In Vietnam they tried to shift this to people who wouldn't get as much media attention or make as many problems when drafted. Calling up the reserve would cause serious problems, and there was a serious battle to avoid calling them up but still come up with the manpower to expand involvement. The draft was very unpopular but they needed soldiers. This culminated in the utterly reprehensible and totally indefensible Project 100,000, which brought us such lovely things as soldiers who ranged between uneducated and straight up mentally ill and thus took much greater casualties (I want to say twice the rate but it's been a while) and folks like a certain Lieutenant William Calley Jr. of My Lai fame (and incidentally is the answer to my childhood question of why the local homeless all had Vietnam Vet caps). This is the extreme worst case of what happens when the war puts people are under pressure to get more soldiers. The US military during the end of and after Vietnam until roughly 1980 was a disgraceful trainwreck. For example they damned near lost the Kitty Hawk to a fire caused by some seriously problematic training and maintenance issues (the same ship had earlier seen a race riot because 1970s America was a mess). The postwar reaction to the problems and deep unpopularity of conscription led to some fun times as the politicians started trying to deal with the problem of fighting a war the population didn't want to fight, and the military tried to deal with the problem of potentially getting sent to fight without the nation behind it. The latter led to things like Total force trying to ensure that the reserves would be called up in case of war by putting all kinds of key support elements into the reserves. The former and the needs for the higher tech, more capable force of the 1980s led to the modern peacetime American volunteer army. There's a different cast to the real peacetime military once the problems really got dealt with to some degree and the military started repairing itself from the damage suffered during Vietnam. People like General Creech did a great job of making the military competent, proud and appealing again, and the recruiting focus shifted from poor people in inner cities who desperately needed money to educated people with the technical skills to be part of the very impressive 80s military set up against the USSR that eventually made Desert Storm look easy. The peacetime military built to be able to take on a technological foe is the "Be All You Can Be" military of opportunity for people trying to make something of themselves and find real opportunity. The difference between a military truly focused on being able to fight a near-peer competitor with bleeding edge technology and one that's desperately trying to come up with enough infantry to secure everything is massive. I would frankly be surprised if a military trying to make ends meet and come up with bodies to go be infantry didn't go looking for people who desperately needed money and start loosening standards. The overriding motivations for people in the peacetime military are likely not close to the people who joined in late 2001 are likely not close to those joining in the middle of an interminable war, and the people being targeted for recruitment are likely not the same. For the most part American soldiers are trying to make something of themselves, but most isn't all, and wearing the uniform doesn't render you immune to criticism. When discussing lovely sorts like Chris Kyle, it's important to remember that most doesn't mean all. And as far as liberals not enlisting in the military (warning: personal subjective opinion), I think there's a pretty significant disconnect on the axiom that being a soldier is de facto defending the country and fighting in any war anywhere is protecting America, its freedoms and its values. I don't fancy the idea of being on the hook the next time we decide to spend huge amounts of other peoples' blood and everybody's money on destroying things and acting surprised when building turns out to be harder than destroying. Food for thought: If we thank soldiers for risking their lives for us, why don't we thank firefighters as such a major cultural thing as thanking soldiers is?

Regarding the whole people constantly on their smartphones thing, it's the same dopamine loop that our Illustrious Predecessors who Clearly had Everything Figured Out™ were riding when everyone was buried in a newspaper on the train back in the day. It's the same one I was riding back when it was a paperback I was cheekbones deep in. Boredom sucks. I'd really rather not be left alone with my own thoughts for company for too long (that changed but more because I'm not as good company as I used to be now that I have stress and responsibilities to deal with than any technonanism though). I've got to say I find it uncanny and hilarious how it's almost impossible to find an article about not doing something popular without a seriously, severely smug tone to it. I'm glad his mental echo chamber is so superior to spending half my time on the phone reading about history. We live in an age of unprecedented access to information and to people who hold different views. May as well use it. Just for once I'd love to see someone not going along with the crowd for reasons that don't have to do with their clear mental or moral superiority. I find it helpful because no matter what I'm going to be distracted. I'm a programmer, I work on a computer. It's much better if I have to go to the effort of picking up my phone, unlocking it and getting in reading position than just twitch and hit alt-tab. Plus, my screens are still showing the test output I'm running so I don't miss my cue to get back to work.

Since you clearly have an argument, you could make it rather than trying to stop discussion.

Form follows function. You'd think he'd learn to hold the thing sideways when trying to extract a round though. I recommend a weapon with a higher rate of fire. A bolt action would do nicely, and the ammo weight would be neatly amortized by the fact that it fires the rounds put through it.

Probably more true because they suddenly went from reasonably acceptable to totally loathed, so the sort of weird obsession most people who go out to commit hate crimes have isn't even necessary. I think that might have something to do with something every male member of a different religion wears becoming part of the visual shorthand for that particular religion because people just don't know and start recycling the confused imagery they were working with when starting. When the rate of crime against a demographic spikes by 1600% in year to year rates in a morning on the strength of four months, there's not much time to go and do proper research.

The demographic that goes out to assault members of a religion generally has a vanishingly small overlap with the people who actually try to know things about that religion.

Limes' tastiness increases with its proximity to spicy food and alcohol however, and we can say that with confidence.

It's not beard if it's above the eyes.

Friendly reminder that thanks to that electricity, the US could supply the Manhattan Project with an amount of electricity on the order of tens of percent of the total energy production of Nazi Germany.

Yeah, and that's more along the lines of what we're working with. Generally we consider the truth a goal in itself, and they really tended to always have an agenda as a reason for why they wrote what they wrote.

That'd be fantastic because saying classical historians were as biased as we are now is a grave disservice to modern historical study and even then there's a very good reason why the word historiography exists and describes a thing that happens.

I'm hoping for Lives of Famous Whores. Suetonius is fun. (I know, chronology). Serious biggest hope for Romain archaeology in general is Claudius' history of the Etruscans and/or his dictionary.

I wouldn't be surprised if the lawyers weren't as keen on the pyrophoric thing.

Back in line with the OP, from Jozef Pilsudski's account of the 1920 war: Fun how things show up.

I would not be entirely unsurprised if the Northrop team were more familiar with what made their bird better than what made the Lockheed one, but them talking about their advantages is definitely interesting.

Some Like it Hot is one of the great comedic works of our species.

I'd always kinda figured the dry ammo storage in the sponsons thing would be the biggest problem for the Panther's flammability, at least in combat.

Sweet. DL that sucker and hit me up on teamspeak sometime.

Nice copy of Dull's Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Oh, and nice tanks.

I think the best game I've heard mentioned is a friend's game. He was playing as Venice, and really didn't want to duel with a big powerful Byzantine Empire. Luckily, they converted to Judaism. Unluckly, Italy somehow fell into the hands of a Doge, who made the entirety of Italy a merchant republic and proceeded to go crusade against Byzantium and basically eat all of Anatolia. I hear the resulting EU4 game was basically unworkable.