Maybe those people were just thin skinned pussies who left bc they got offended too many times. Thats why most of them are on Tumblr, because Tumblr is the weenie hut jr’s of social websites and you know that. Its okay, you can admit you’re a pussy Palimpsest.
The whole Captain-America-is-a-Nazi-now thing reminded me of something, about all the straight white goys who think being a Nazi must have been cool.
The whole thing about the racial community, the Volk, was pretty much bullshit. Nazi leadership orchestrated the brutal mass murder of those they considered outsiders, but that does not mean they actually cared about the well-being or even the survival of insiders. Hitler himself considered the majority of Aryan Germans subhuman, gullible idiots. (His term is Hühnervolk, chicken people.) The average German may have been told he was an Übermensch war hero, but he was still used as cannon fodder, a worthless, disposable human tool. I’ve read mood reports from the last years of the war: the consensus amongst German civilians seems to be that there must be some secret weapon or secret plan that will turn the tide of war, because without one, Germany is losing so obviously that even an idiot could tell there’s no hope for victory. So if the leadership is still not giving up, and still sending men to the front to die, and still telling civilians to sit out the bombing, there must be something, or else we’re all dying for no reason. Nazism pretty much betrayed the people it was supposed to be for.
So the thing I want to tell young people attracted to Nazi ideology isn’t ‘you’re empowering yourself at the cost of the murder of others’, it’s ‘you’re gunning for someone who has no qualms sending you out to die a miserable death for no reason.’ What I want to say is, ‘you should know that just because you’re not amongst the first to be put into the meat grinder doesn’t mean you won’t end up there within the decade.’
hell, we don’t even need to look at germany: you see this over and over again in american history. the 30′s, 50′s, 80′s, this last election. constantly. the white poor are whipped into a racist frenzy over seeing nonwhites doing their best to survive, they’re told other races are enemy combatants come to steal all their shit instead of fellow citizens and natural allies against the upper class, then the poor whites all vote for politicians who promise to keep necessary resources away from the undeserving subhumans. the politicians make good on their word by funneling those resources up to themselves and their friends. the poor, white and black, all fucking suffer for it— but at least the white poor get to feel real fucking special while their kids sicken and die.
Will Smith performs “wild wild west” one of the best performances i’ve ever seen
What a time to be alive
A whole ass horse
all i can think about is: that poor fucking horse
He’s only asking it to walk along and then stop, and while it’s got one of those lever-action bits in he doesn’t look like he’s yanking on it or anything (like they do in old black-and-white movies). Horses that can walk through crowds of hooting, applauding people don’t grow on trees, and are instead the product of significant investment in training time. In context, it would be really weird if the horse wasn’t fine and well-taken-care of. A good horse.
YES. This whole thread is the best thing and betterbemeta’s tags (above) are on point. I would love actual ‘realistic ancient battles’ where like ten actual fighters and whatever serfs they can persuade to accompany them posture and try to intimidate each other, or have an Official Scrum on a mutually beneficial day. That and just…cattle raiding.
I guess in post-collapse terms it’s theoretically different because your whole raider gang exists to nick other people’s shit so doesn’t need to cultivate or craft much except perhaps to make them more self-sufficient in weaponry, armaments, and other logistical things that’ll enable them to raid harder and more often. That’s exactly why, on the other side of things, as many citizen’s as possible in your vulnerable good-guy farming commune might need to be militia members to protect themselves from people who can dedicate their full-time everyday energy to Being Raiders.
I say in theory because, even if you’re nicking other people’s shit, why not treat that as a bonus? Why not look to history’s peoples who placed a particular import on raiding as a way of life, and notice that none of them were just straight-up predators. They had enough agricultural or pastoral or pescatoral (is that a word?) infrastructure to subsist, and then the luxury, the surplus, came from attacking other people part-time, very occasionally. Look at norse folks going viking; look at the invasive pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe. Just in terms of the caloric requirements and risks inherent in combat, you’re not gonna want to do that full-time. Training to do it well will take more calories and they need to come from somewhere. You pick your battles. You take without fighting at all where you can – so intimidation and making enemies surrender without having to fight is important here; c.f. pirates of the Golden Age – and you fight rarely and only when you know you can a) win, b) benefit hugely from it.
THANK YOU
i think this post has changed my world. literally.
the ‘death is cheap’ approach to warfare only really came on the scene in the 19th century, and not full-blown until WW1. the american civil war and similar conflicts, with mass charges against cannon and the like, that’s a very modern approach to warfare and it assumes manpower is your cheapest resource.
in a non-industrialized setting, manpower is your most EXPENSIVE resource. you don’t throw masses of bodies against a position unless you’re an idiot, except in very rare cases – say, xerxes vs the 300 – where numbers are your only advantage and you don’t have any other options.
in pre-industrial warfare, tactics could make a shockingly outsized difference. there are many documented cases of a few commandos or a surprise flanking move defeating an army ten, twenty times their size. well-trained, well-equipped soldiers are not expendable in that setting. they are your best hope of winning. a medieval warlord would no more throw away his knights, archers, sappers, or other trained troops on massed action than a modern general would throw away her heavy bombers on a strafing run. that’s not how you use those.
just as the modern general uses long-range missiles for bombardment before sending in rare and expensive things like helicopter gunships for close engagement, the medieval warlord used mobile cavalry to isolate and harrass the enemy, and archers to soften them up, before picking his moment and ground to strike with heavy cavalry.
as ellis points out, these trained and equipped troops need a lot of support. reducing the enemy’s support was an essential tactic. when fantasy writers have a siege happen, they tend to think it’s just about starving the other guy or breaking down the wall. but the besieged army often ran into trouble long before that. running out of arrows was a problem, for instance, and when you eat your horses you no longer have a cavalry. a lot of times, that heroic ‘sally forth’ business that broke a siege one way or the other was just because it was eat the horses or use them, and a knight on foot was no longer able to fulfil his tactical role, so the leader rolled the dice rather than have his knights downgraded to footsoldiers.
one result of the need for civilian support for these troops was that you really, really didn’t want to slaughter the peasants if you could help it – at least not if you were taking over the territory, or thought you might want to at some point. it’s not like you could just ship a hundred thousand political prisoners from moscow to work the farms. the peasants WERE the land. without them, it was just a lot of mud you had to get across. you couldn’t stay, you couldn’t use it.
so i’d advise a moratorium on medieval armies burning every farm they pass, and slaughtering the inhabitants of cities they occupy. a few particularly ruthless warlords in history did that a few times, to make a point, and it was shocking back then, or it wouldn’t have worked. alaric sacked rome as revenge, not a takeover bid; you wouldn’t do that to a city you wanted to keep.
just moving along like everyone else 