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Posted
1 hour ago, Pods said:

For anyone that didn't watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, this page has gotten weird. 

I haven't watched this illustrious program, but I've decided a crack addiction is the key to my financial future.

Posted

I believe 8 out of 10 German soldiers in WW2 were killed by Russians.

 

image.thumb.png.ff113c78d9499c7897a2543db3bf6abf.png

 

The western front was important, but the big part of the war, by far, was in the east. The USSR won that war with our help.

Posted

I still remember debating Sushi on the number of divisions in the Afrika Korps vs Ostfront good times!

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Posted
53 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

Fixed.

 

The western front was important, but the big part of the war, by far, was in the east. The Allies won that war with USSR losing the vast # of citizens.

 

Posted
1 hour ago, RomaVicta said:

I believe 8 out of 10 German soldiers in WW2 were killed by Russians.

 

image.thumb.png.ff113c78d9499c7897a2543db3bf6abf.png

 

The western front was important, but the big part of the war, by far, was in the east. The USSR won that war with our help.

Some of my professors for my masters degree I am doing right now run that museum and a lot of the lectures I watch are filmed there. One in particular has written 10 books on the Wehrmacht during the war. Much of his writing has to do with the brutal fighting of the Eastern Front. 

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Posted
5 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

I believe 8 out of 10 German soldiers in WW2 were killed by Russians.

 

image.thumb.png.ff113c78d9499c7897a2543db3bf6abf.png

 

The western front was important, but the big part of the war, by far, was in the east. The USSR won that war with our help.

Well, they also started the war and didn’t  actually liberate any of the places they fought so I’d say the honor of doing heavy-lifting was well-earned. 
 

Everyone’s favorite counter factual is “what if Hitler doesn’t do Barbarossa?”

Mine is “what if the USSR doesn’t help Germany carve up Poland or even makes it clear that attacking Poland is unacceptable along with the Western Allies.” They’d have had a whole-ass country between them and the Germans and Germany’s options in the West would have been far less-certain without Molotov-Ribbentrop. 
 

But honestly Hitler not invading the Soviet Union is far more realistic than Russia or any of its permutations not behaving like a predator and trying to make friends with the worst people in the world. I get why no one considers mine.

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Posted
1 minute ago, 956 Worldwide said:

...To bring it back to Trump’s America, for some reason a big chunk of our country has adopted alien Russian pathologies and neuroses as their own and has decided to surrender complete American victory for no reason other than petulance and a poisoned information environment. 

I read the print edition at the library (PTL that its shelves are still full) but there is a recent New Yorker article by Andrew Marantz titled "Is It Happening Here?" in which he discusses some points adjacent to your discussion.

I can provide a link and will post it below as I suspect the original is paywalled. I have found a different link that may work, but anyhow, the author references other research including the authors of How Democracies Die, but what I found interesting was the section where he wrote about the hollowing out of Central European University amidst Viktor Orban's solidification of power in Hungary and the inconvenient questions it raises for citizens (I"m grossly paraphrasing here and will spoiler a quote that is taken slightly out of context)

Spoiler

Zoltan Miklósi, a political philosopher in Budapest as interviewed by the author: "People want to believe that the world they live in, the system they live under, is mostly fair." In 2015, one of his colleagues at CEU 'made the case, very meticulously, that we no longer live in a democracy. ' ..."I felt, ' I cannot go there'--it seemed too extreme. But I had to admit that I couldn't think of good counter-arguments....if I admit that I live in an autocracy, especially a 'hybrid autocracy' that functions by unpredictable rules, this raises a lot of other inconvenient questions."

 

Marantz: Many of a citizen's fundamental decisions--whether to vote, whether to follow the law--presuppose a democratically legitimate state.

Miklósi: "If that's gone, then how am I supposed to live?"

Marantz saying that "in the real world the cataclysm often comes in on little cat feet, muffled and distant so that people continually adapt, explaining away the anomalies" seems to be what a large part of our populace is undergoing.

IMO, it's a good article and while a slightly longer read, it's worth the time.

Link:

https://milled.com/the-new-yorker/is-it-happening-here-STvOfTBFmOuoAthB

This is a podcast link below and not the article. I didn't listen to the podcast.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/how-bad-is-it-andrew-marantz-on-the-health-of-our-democracy

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Posted (edited)
35 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

By all strategic measures the United States was the victor of the war. It emerged with the fewest losses, the most credibility, and it built a world order and economy that benefited itself and attracted the wealthiest and most valuable allies to its side. The “losers” on the battlefield aligned themselves with the United States, accepted its primacy and even internalized the values and principles it espoused as their own. 
 

The Soviet Army defeated the German army on the battlefield.  It gained sullen and deeply antagonistic territory ruled by brittle puppet regimes.  The choices it made in the wake of its battlefield victory discredited its ideology and hegemony and directly led to its eventual destruction as the USSR and the collapse of its influence and prestige. 

I differentiate betwee winning a war within the time frame of the war from who most benefits after the war.

We emerged with, as everyone knows, an intact infrastructure and already booming industry which switched easily to producing for the countries who's industries were destroyed. I think we ended up with 50% of the world market. Oceans protected us more than anything.

Sure, we profited the most from what the world was like at the completion of the conflict. I argue that we benefitted from the USSR's conquest of the massive bulk of the Nazi war machine more than anybody, but none of that happens without their effort and guts and determination.

Also, might your position also apply to Canada? Australia? I think they also fit the model.

35 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

To bring it back to Trump’s America, for some reason a big chunk of our country has adopted alien Russian pathologies and neuroses as their own and has decided to surrender complete American victory for no reason other than petulance and a poisoned information environment. 

Hear! Hear!

We profoundly disagree on some subjects, but your opinions are always worthwhile.

Edited by RomaVicta
Posted
10 hours ago, Pods said:

For anyone that didn't watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, this page has gotten weird. 

And by the way, I thought the rape scene went really well.
 

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Posted
2 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

I differentiate betwee winning a war within the time frame of the war from who most benefits after the war.

We emerged with, as everyone knows, an intact infrastructure and already booming industry which switched easily to producing for the countries who's industries were destroyed. I think we ended up with 50% of the world market. Oceans protected us more than anything.

Sure, we profited the most from what the world was like at the completion of the conflict. I argue that we benefitted from the USSR's conquest of the massive bulk of the Nazi war machine more than anybody, but none of that happens without their effort and guts and determination.

Also, might your position also apply to Canada? Australia? I think they also fit the model.

Hear! Hear!

We profoundly disagree on some subjects, but your opinions are always worthwhile.

Whatever our contribution to victory in WWII, and it was substantial, regardless, one can win with humility.

Especially when our territory, its infrastructure, and our civilian population were never seriously endangered and largely because of that we reaped substantial benefit for the next half century or so.

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Posted
3 hours ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

I read the print edition at the library (PTL that its shelves are still full) but there is a recent New Yorker article by Andrew Marantz titled "Is It Happening Here?" in which he discusses some points adjacent to your discussion.

I can provide a link and will post it below as I suspect the original is paywalled. I have found a different link that may work, but anyhow, the author references other research including the authors of How Democracies Die, but what I found interesting was the section where he wrote about the hollowing out of Central European University amidst Viktor Orban's solidification of power in Hungary and the inconvenient questions it raises for citizens (I"m grossly paraphrasing here and will spoiler a quote that is taken slightly out of context)

  Hide contents

Zoltan Miklósi, a political philosopher in Budapest as interviewed by the author: "People want to believe that the world they live in, the system they live under, is mostly fair." In 2015, one of his colleagues at CEU 'made the case, very meticulously, that we no longer live in a democracy. ' ..."I felt, ' I cannot go there'--it seemed too extreme. But I had to admit that I couldn't think of good counter-arguments....if I admit that I live in an autocracy, especially a 'hybrid autocracy' that functions by unpredictable rules, this raises a lot of other inconvenient questions."

 

Marantz: Many of a citizen's fundamental decisions--whether to vote, whether to follow the law--presuppose a democratically legitimate state.

Miklósi: "If that's gone, then how am I supposed to live?"

Marantz saying that "in the real world the cataclysm often comes in on little cat feet, muffled and distant so that people continually adapt, explaining away the anomalies" seems to be what a large part of our populace is undergoing.

IMO, it's a good article and while a slightly longer read, it's worth the time.

Link:

https://milled.com/the-new-yorker/is-it-happening-here-STvOfTBFmOuoAthB

This is a podcast link below and not the article. I didn't listen to the podcast.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/how-bad-is-it-andrew-marantz-on-the-health-of-our-democracy

Excellent post, and thank you for the link. It’s maddening for anyone passingly familiar with the Hungarian experience to see it repeated here, especially as the playbook has been explicitly copied from Orban. Orban has neither protected democracy or deliver on the stated goals of his anti-liberal program (increased birth rates, rising equality, increased security).  He has delivered cronyism, corruption, and culture war distractions and it turns out this is what Americans really crave too. 

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Posted
3 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

I differentiate betwee winning a war within the time frame of the war from who most benefits after the war.

We emerged with, as everyone knows, an intact infrastructure and already booming industry which switched easily to producing for the countries who's industries were destroyed. I think we ended up with 50% of the world market. Oceans protected us more than anything.

Sure, we profited the most from what the world was like at the completion of the conflict. I argue that we benefitted from the USSR's conquest of the massive bulk of the Nazi war machine more than anybody, but none of that happens without their effort and guts and determination.

Also, might your position also apply to Canada? Australia? I think they also fit the model.

Hear! Hear!

We profoundly disagree on some subjects, but your opinions are always worthwhile.

Honestly if we go this route then what needs to be acknowledged is the British role in all this, which is not sufficiently appreciated by either Americans or Russians.  The Soviets fought a desperate war of choice after trying to collude with the Germans.  The British fought by themselves and with obstinacy across oceans and the non-continental theater for several years despite having every opportunity to sit it out. The Royal Navy and the British in North Africa are why Germany wasn’t a true empire that could have choked the USSR out in 1941.  There is no lend-lease to save the Soviets without the Royal Navy.

And for that matter they were at least as critical to Normandy and the strategic bombing campaign. For that matter they did basically all of the Enigma cracking and anything in U-571 was also done by the British. Anyone looking for who stepped up needs to start with Churchill. 

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Posted
12 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Honestly if we go this route then what needs to be acknowledged is the British role in all this, which is not sufficiently appreciated by either Americans or Russians.  The Soviets fought a desperate war of choice after trying to collude with the Germans.  The British fought by themselves and with obstinacy across oceans and the non-continental theater for several years despite having every opportunity to sit it out. The Royal Navy and the British in North Africa are why Germany wasn’t a true empire that could have choked the USSR out in 1941.  There is no lend-lease to save the Soviets without the Royal Navy.

And for that matter they were at least as critical to Normandy and the strategic bombing campaign. For that matter they did basically all of the Enigma cracking and anything in U-571 was also done by the British. Anyone looking for who stepped up needs to start with Churchill. 

And for all that, they lost their Empire entirely,  their economy was devastated and they ultimately went from the world superpower to a second tier has been.  

Posted
36 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Excellent post, and thank you for the link. It’s maddening for anyone passingly familiar with the Hungarian experience to see it repeated here, especially as the playbook has been explicitly copied from Orban. Orban has neither protected democracy or deliver on the stated goals of his anti-liberal program (increased birth rates, rising equality, increased security).  He has delivered cronyism, corruption, and culture war distractions and it turns out this is what Americans really crave too. 

It's getting harder and harder to resolve the tensions between my moral and philosophical support for democracy with my very low opinion of the American electorate. 

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Posted
1 minute ago, Chad Fuck said:

And for all that, they lost their Empire entirely,  their economy was devastated and they ultimately went from the world superpower to a second tier has been.  

In WWI, the Brits burned through their human capital.

In WWII, the Brits burned through their economic capital.

That was a one-two punch from which they couldn't ever really recover.  Victory, but at such a cost.

There's a lesson in there for all wars - sure, you won....but look at the cost.  There are mostly just different levels of losers in war.

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Posted
1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

In WWI, the Brits burned through their human capital.

In WWII, the Brits burned through their economic capital.

That was a one-two punch from which they couldn't ever really recover.  Victory, but at such a cost.

There's a lesson in there for all wars - sure, you won....but look at the cost.  There are mostly just different levels of losers in war.

Losers.  And suckers.

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Posted
36 minutes ago, Gooby said:

Harvard responded......

 

According to the comments, it was an MIT student who marked it up.  Still great though.

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Posted
Harvard responded......
 

I noticed in the second page they circled the dash usage. For me that’s a telltale sign that letter was poorly written with AI. For whatever reason, AI loves to use dashes in text it writes.
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Posted
6 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:


I noticed in the second page they circled the dash usage. For me that’s a telltale sign that letter was poorly written with AI. For whatever reason, AI loves to use dashes in text it writes.

lol, in my org em dashes are part of our writing style

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chatgpt-hypen-em-dash-ai-writing-1235314945/?PAVED-2025_04_15=&sponsored=0&position=7&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=56adb5d4-1500-4898-81c4-cd72f651af79&url=https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chatgpt-hypen-em-dash-ai-writing-1235314945/

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Posted (edited)

I thought dashes and ellipses on half finished thoughts were boomer tells 

Edited by seven
Posted (edited)

RE: Sunny, and specifically The Nightman Cometh episode.

How did I not know this was a thing:

 

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

Quote

In September 2009, the cast took their show live. The "Gang" performed the musical The Nightman Cometh in New York City, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.[3] Mary Elizabeth Ellis and Artemis Pebdani also appeared in the performance as The Waitress and Artemis. Actress Rhea Perlman (wife of Danny DeVito) assumed the role of Gladys.[4]

McElhenney said that Live Nation originally approached the cast about doing the show in 30 cities, but the cast settled on 6.[5] Howerton described the show as "essentially an expanded version of the actual episode of "The Nightman Cometh", which was the final episode for season four. There are some added moments, added scenes, added songs, and extended versions of songs that already existed."[6] Two new songs were included in the performance and a longer running time allowed for greater improvisation by the actors. The performance was also preceded by a preview screening of a season five episode.

The Los Angeles performance, filmed at The Troubadour, was included as a bonus feature on the season four DVD box set.

 

And here it is:

 

 

 

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Posted
On 5/5/2025 at 8:52 PM, Firemans4Horn said:

Midterms will go great

 

 

Short of the military rolling in, arresting the governor and letting her out themselves, Tina's not gonna see the light of day.

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Posted
7 hours ago, TexArcher said:

If Russia managed to install an agent, and I mean a fully flipped and controlled asset, as President to destroy America from the inside, what would they be doing differently?

Nothing.  They'd be doing exactly this.

As insane as it sounds, it's the explanation that explains it the best.  Because if it were just stupidity, they wouldn't be fucking things up so efficiently.  They'd just be bumbling around.  This is a master class in how to completely neuter the most powerful nation on the planet in just a few months.

And it benefits Russia and China.  All of it.

There has never been a truer post than this.

You nailed it.

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Posted (edited)

@InkaUtexasI don't have Facebook so the platform won't let me wander around in someone's account like it used to but here's a link (click on his name) I found:

The avatar photos match, but he's using first person in Willfully Horn's post and is (according to his page) not a WWII vet so with not being able to scroll too long before Zuck's minion's kick me out as a nonuser, difficult to verify sources and what he's doing (i.e. reposting other blogs or quoting or what).

Edited by Mrs Whiggins
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Posted
5 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

@InkaUtexasI don't have Facebook so the platform won't let me wander around in someone's account like it used to but here's a link (click on his name) I found:

The avatar photos match, but he's using first person in Willfully Horn's post and is (according to his page) not a WWII vet so with not being able to scroll too long before Zuck's minion's kick me out as a nonuser, difficult to verify sources and what he's doing (i.e. reposting other blogs or quoting or what).

yeah, I don;t use it either. I decided my sanity was more important than the latest deals on crap I do not need.

 

Thank you though!

Posted (edited)

He would have been fragged during Viet Nam. As a New Jersey reservist showing up to camp in Hackensack only half the time required to yell at the privates and non-coms who can't yell back.

image.thumb.png.2bf87d0bb4b3261975cda5e4aee4f03d.png

*Killed in Hackensack

Edited by RomaVicta
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Posted
7 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

He would have been fragged during Viet Nam. As a New Jersey reservist showing up to camp in Hackensack only half the time required to yell at the privates and non-coms who can't yell back.

image.thumb.png.2bf87d0bb4b3261975cda5e4aee4f03d.png

*Killed in Hackensack

image.jpeg.dfc905b9ce2fdd56291d21e9b38e98df.jpeg

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Posted
3 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

image.thumb.png.37ef94704fbd6f2ff43bc1ea3ebd700a.png

Assuming this is real (this damn simulation we live in!), it would be a high honor to buy that guy a beer or two.

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Posted (edited)
3 hours ago, Firemans4Horn said:

Hot dog brain

 

 

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Who will ever forget the bombing missions of General George Washington? The Italian Bonzai charges, so brave and horrible? They were suckers really. Dying like dogs.  They make such good meatballs...Remember the Old Spaghetti Warehouse? Great food, I tell ya. Came in a bowl, did you know that? A lot of people don't know that. But...victory. The nasty woman is holding up a sign like I've lost my way. Can you  believe that? Victory Day, she says.  I find my way like no one has ever seen before. Okay. Victory Day, shoulda had one of those back in 2020 from me, but I never talk about it. I never get credit for that, and that's ok. 

Whoever these guys are raising the flag...oh, I love that flag...it's beautiful...so beautiful. It it wasn't so old, I'd date it...

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Edited by RomaVicta
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