fie! a greate beaste doth devour thy fields! we must haste to slay it before its devilish task is done

the bundling of the open primary with ranked confuses and is opposed by more people. just ranked choice would do better i think, people can wrap their heads around that but you start talking about how two (enemy party) candidates can go to the general and your (good party) candidates wouldn’t in an open primary–even though the enemy winning would be fait-accompli in the old system too–but I guess not being able to cast your FPTP protest votes on candidates who never win in solid districts would break the kayfabe

reportedly even more on paying the celebrities to appear

rich lib celebrities are supposed to give YOU money how do you enter a political bribery contest and fail to be bribed

When these services are public, they don’t hold industry back from booming

on a national level. they do this is in the imperial core where their firms are based for an important political reason, but in the third world nations are only good for international capital in that they give a name to an army and police force they can use to discipline third world labor. if you own a tin mine there is no interest in providing roads or health care to anyone that isn’t directly involved in your enterprise, at worst it’s helping your competition and class enemies. privatization is in no sense a rejection of the infrastructure for production and extraction, but the exclusion of everything else from that arithmetic. if the IMF privatizes a country’s railroads the people who are going to own that are the foreign capitalists who need it for their business, not some third party waltzing in to extract rent and infringe on their profits

i trawled r/askhistorians, i can’t account for beria’s #1 fan living in a georgian bunker and printing defenses on a far right russian forum but:

cw:sv

I like this except the inflicting of germans on other places, just leave them there under the multinational occupations. Half the french zone should be algerian or syrian to replicate the british-british-indian split as well

Yeah probably, it always sounds like you’re giving credit to them when you assert it but the reasonable thing to do when you see a massive, dangerous, inhospitable peak is to just not climb it. it isn’t like space where we can do experiments and have useful satellites up there and shit. planes and balloons were going higher decades before that MF did that shit. everyone going up that fucker is a tourist doing it for vanitie

really ? 1789 is perfectly salient lol

i think it’s somewhat inherited from anglo-german imperialists who made such claims to exceptionalize themselves as the good capitalists and imperialists, whereas the catholics (particularly spain, italy) had a backwardsness and ineptitude in their imperializing and capitalizing.

suggesting some amount of social democrats are not liberals

i’d say we need to pickle him for study but we already did and we got NOTHING how is this man real. why is this man real

incredible bit

crossbows were literally bourgeois, the guilds in the urban centres were manufacturing them

I have to think this is a materials problem, not an ideas problem. even if it were possible with wood and medieval iron or steel, a bow that costs way more than typical ones faces the classic weapons innovation bottleneck. cool concepts that are too complicated and expensive to arm a regiment end up novelties in a noble’s hunting weapon collection.

this discussion is a false dichotomy wrought out of centuries of british antiquarians masturbating themselves delirious about the single period in english history they were actually able to trade with a peer on land. both crossbows and bows are fine. and neither were magic medieval armor-piercing ammunition.

much ado is made about the longbowmen ‘long training period’ but it was the common recreation & hunting tool, you generally had plenty of potential archers, the problem was economics—levying peasant laborforces for military service sucks for the harvest, and it was difficult to attract men to the campaigns professionally if there’s not a labor surplus. the same stressors applied to crossbow soldiers, you didn’t want nobodies without experience with crossbows either. the theoretical lower skill requirements isn’t going to be relevant unless you’re opening up an armory while under siege. unskilled burghers in that situation weren’t particularly potent anyway, whatever implements you might give them.

so all we’re really talking about is tactics, and it’s pretty simple: is the field restricted, are there terrain obstructions and physical obstacles? clear case for crossbows because they require less space for the firing and range isn’t an issue. on the other hand, a big field to maneuver can make the best of bows’ range. if you want a rounded 14th century army you’d obviously bring both. notice ‘firepower’ is not included here, because whether or not 5% more missiles bite into an armor plate is not what decides a battle. missiles are harassment that damages the cohesion and effectiveness of the enemy, they don’t have to directly kill people to achieve their purpose.

why is the hair like that it’s uncomfortable

i yearn for sneckte-wear to be socially acceptable

getting an engelbert humperdink poster and insisting to anyone who sees it that its engels

this is something i legitimately do not get. oh course he lied. politicians lie. so why didn’t they? i don’t think the electorate got any wiser, but this campaign refused to make the specific promises—for no discernible reason? they couldn’t seriously be worried about getting called out on a promises factsheet or whatever, their pet media just lies on those too. do they think donors will take them seriously and they can’t wink at them at a fundraiser? it’s a baffling unforced error for which i have no explanation

what a gaggle of sniveling cowards lmao