• Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world
      59·
      14 days ago

      Yooo same. Why the fuck don’t these people just fuck off and relax? I can’t imagine having that much money and still feeling like I have to go to work.

      • themoken@startrek.website
        23·
        14 days ago

        Because at some point after the first few million you turn into a dragon that must hoard wealth and the people that generate that wealth become a cost to minimize.

          • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
            3·
            14 days ago

            When I’m a billionaire (and no longer temporarily embarrassed), I’m going to fund so much tasteless art. And by art I mean mostly pornography. But I’ll hire the best advisors to make sure it’s a classy positive influence on society.

  • andros_rex@lemmy.world
    47·
    14 days ago

    The best class I took in college was an intercession course about the Vietnam War. We had to read an entire book pretty much every day, which was great prep for grad school.

    I basically learned that the entire war was completely unjustified, it was horrific and brutal on both sides in ways that aren’t talked about, but that ultimately the United States had absolutely no business interfering. Vietnam had spent years under French colonial control, which they overthrew under their own power. They had already asserted a desire to rule themselves.

    Tonkin was also a genuine false flag, which just isn’t acknowledged? We manufactured the cause for an extremely unpopular war. So many young man died or were disabled because of something that was pointless.

    That class was first that really got me to question the patriotic narrative I was taught about American history in high school.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
    46·
    14 days ago

    I’m the War on Christmas guy, and I’m getting my ass handed to me every single year.

  • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
    31·
    14 days ago

    The seven years war is fantastic and is utterly critical to understanding the US Revolution as well as understanding how the Iroquois pulled a power move on the other first nations that worked, but later led to the current situation with first nations in North America.

    On the revolution: Namely that corruption was so endemic in the colonies that when the UK actually started to do something about it the revolution happened albeit with a lot of pushing from the upper crust of the colonies.

    • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      14 days ago

      Fun couterfactual to consider: how many MPs would “the colonies” have needed to blunt popular support for the revolution?

      Probably can’t go very high, but maybe one per charter? If not that high (Scotland only had 45, I think), then what would have been enough “representation” to preclude the American elites from making a compelling case, or what paths to personal status would have tempted enough of them that there wouldn’t have been a critical mass of will and resources?

      The British colonized the Americas, particularly North America, very differently than Spain and France did, but didn’t seem to think of the purpose or integration of colonies as any different.

      • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
        1·
        14 days ago

        The answer would probably be “none”.

        For example, the factors that led the average member of “sons of liberty” in New York after the initial elite only membership was worried about the elites owning massive tracks of land and driving up the cost of land for them.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.world
      4·
      14 days ago

      The UK trying to section off an Indian reserve as a buffer state after the French and Indian War was 100% a cause of the Revolution. Also the UK trying to step in and say “no, you are not allowed to purchase all of Kentucky from one random person.”

      Funny how that’s never talked about in K-12 history. Or even undergrad. It’s all about those nasty taxes (after spending how much on troops to kill Indians who kinda had every reason to be pissed off?)

      • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
        5·
        14 days ago

        Yes, it is more complex than that.

        1. It was that the UK was saying the Ohio valley, which the entire NA part of the war was over was off limits to the colonists.

        However, the UK could not have won the war when they did had those native groups not changed sides to ally with them. Given the dire state of the UK finances, its questionable how much longer they could have fought.

        That land would also not have been needed had the elite of the colonies not taken ridiculous amounts of land for themselves.

        1. At least particularly to Pennsylvania, in the middle of the war; the Iroquois interfered with a treaty that would have seen the colony recognize the land held by the Delaware tribe in the Ohio river valley as Delaware tribe land. They(the Iroquois) did so because they wanted to be the only tribe to make deals with the English and would force the other native groups to work through them. This strategy is also why the Delaware tribe had been relocated by the Iroquois to the Ohio valley in the first place.
    • Sergio@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      14 days ago

      TIL:

      It is now believed that the Ottoman military was able to maintain rough parity with its rivals until the 1760s, falling behind as a consequence of a long period of peace on its western front between 1740 and 1768, when the Ottomans missed out on the advances associated with the Seven Years’ War.[66]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_decline_thesis

  • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    25·
    14 days ago

    WWIII nut here.

    Get yourself a Red Cross emergency kit, a lot of water jugs, and ramen. You’re underestimating your chances of survival and how much you’ll want to.

    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      14 days ago

      You’re underestimating your chances of survival and how much you’ll want to.

      yes, you too can live out the remainder of your miserable days scrambling for rat meat in the irradiated future.

      of course, the desire to live, to survive, overcomes a lot, but ‘want to live’ I think is stretching it a bit.

      • ours@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        13 days ago

        I’ve worked briefly with civil defense stuff and got to visit and learn a whole bunch about bunkers. That cemented my “take out the long chair, open my best bottle, put on some shades, and enjoy the brief light show” approach to a hypothetical nuclear alert.

      • Sergio@slrpnk.netEnglish
        3·
        14 days ago

        I suspect what they’re getting at is: there are a lot of scenarios other than “all out exchange between major powers”, and when the fallout starts floating, you can either just hang out at home (and die of cancer in a year or two), or shelter in a basement for a week (and emerge to a troubled but liveable world.)

          • Sergio@slrpnk.netEnglish
            3·
            14 days ago

            I’m familiar with the extinction event scenarios, and agree that in some cases one may not find the world worth living in. I recommend Krepinevich’s “7 Deadly Scenarios”, a couple of those involve nuclear attacks. The sitations are comparable to the recent Covid pandemic: millions of people die, the world is subsequently scarred, but life goes on for most people. A bit of planning can make things less horrible and a lot of it overlaps with natural disaster.

            • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              14 days ago

              I think you may misunderstand. <edit or I’m misreading your replies>

              Jacob’s book covers an all in exchange. everyone goes max. very little in the northern hemisphere would survive. a bit of planning, all the planning in the world - neither will save you when each side is maximizing the amount of fallout with ground strikes with megaton weapons.

              the ‘lucky’ folk in the southern hemisphere will just have to wait until the after effects catch up to them.

              Jacob’s scenario is megadeaths to gigadeaths - literally a billion dead directly (flash/blast/etc) and multiple billions dead shortly after. Krepinevich’s scenario is a few terrorists with tactical weapons.

              these are wildly different things.

              <edit I don’t think you’re meaning to downplay the seriousness of any kind of major nuclear exchange, but just underestimating how seriously civilization ending it is>

              • Sergio@slrpnk.netEnglish
                2·
                13 days ago

                Yeah, I suspect we basically agree on things. I grew up with Threads and The Day After, and later I read up on nuclear winter and EMPs so I realize that human extinction is a very real possibility.

                But apart from that, the question is: how to prepare for the “less than extinction” scenarios, the sort of thing that Krepinevich and ready.gov discuss.

  • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
    23·
    14 days ago

    I missed the memo. I am just generally anti war and don’t like reading about them. War is all because of dickhead leaders that can’t act decent, treat others right, or talk things out without being little insecure manbabies. And when manchildren in power have their big boi pp insulted they make the less powerful fight for them instead of doing anything respectful. Some rebellions which lead to wars are justified. Gotta stick it back to the empowered manchildren sometimes. But it all comes down to a shitty leader.

    • TSG_Asmodeus (he, him)@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      14 days ago

      I decided to focus on wars of leftest and/or peasant uprisings. Often heart breaking, but man if you’ve ever enjoyed cheering for the underdog, they are definitely that. Plus, you’re automatically learning about the Class War at the same time :D

    • andros_rex@lemmy.world
      6·
      14 days ago

      It can be very valuable and interesting to study the surrounding context of a war. Military history with battles and kill counts and discussions of tactics is something I find boring af, but there are endless discussions to be had about how the causes of the American Civil War can be traced back to before even the Revolution and tracing the repercussions of the war all the way up through to current politics.

      Think about how the Taiping Rebellion, which killed more than 20 million people, would have affected day to day life in 19th century China - which weakened China and rendered it more vulnerable to European powers. Think the Opium Wars. Think about how Hong Kong was just returned to China in 1999 - and all of the complexities that entailed.

      Or how the World Wars depopulated Russia. You had a generation dead or traumatized. Russian alcoholism is usually treated as a joke - trauma can have intergenerational changes in genetic expression.

      Wars also make excellent chronological signposts. I’ garbage at dates, but usually wars segment significant social/economic/cultural/blah/blah/blah changes that they help me keep events organized in my head.

    • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      I think you missed the joke, it’s not making a point about all wars being bad it’s about middle aged dudes being obsessed with wars

      • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
        4·
        14 days ago

        I understood the joke just fine. I started my comment off with “I missed the memo” implying I never took any interest in wars or never got assigned a war to obsess over.

  • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
    22·
    14 days ago

    WWI was objectively the most world changing and sets the stage for the entire modern era, if you squint WWII was just the Extended Edition of WWI all that being said WWIII was still my favorite.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      12·
      14 days ago

      « Ce n’est pas une paix, c’est un armistice de vingt ans » — Ferdinand Foch about the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

      Often translated as “This isn’t a peace treaty, it’s an armistice for twenty years.” but some might prefer “This is no peace, it’s a twenty-year ceasefire.”