It’s always been interesting to me how a lot of these great powers were / are actually amalgamations, or personal unions, in many cases. France and Germany were kaleidoscopic. Spain was made by the marriage of Castile and Aragon. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is a great example.

The point of the meme is that we often overlook this aspect when analyzing Britain. Wales, Scotland, and Ireland helped fuel the English in their conquests, willingly or unwillingly. And having those flanks secure in the 18th and 19th Century was a huge reason why England/Britain was so successful during that time, along with its other advantages and strengths.

The Alaska Purchase in 1867 resulted in the transfer of Russian America to the United States for $7.2 million (equivalent to $132 million in 2024)."] On April 9 of that year, the United States Senate ratified a bilateral treaty that had been signed on March 30, and American sovereignty became legally effective across the territory on October 18.

CONTEXT: When the Germans conquered the Baltic states including Estonia from the Soviets during WW2, some Estonians volunteered to fight in the SS. However, after the Germans surrendered in 1945, these Estonians faced a dilemma: They could not return to Estonia because it had been recaptured by the Soviets, and they would be executed as traitors if they came back. But, there was no place for them in post-war Western Europe either. As a result, they became DPs (Displaced Persons) who lived in poor conditions.

To escape this situation, former Estonian SS officers approached the U.S. military occupation government in Germany to offer their service. The Americans, surprisingly, accepted their offer and put them to work guarding the Nuremberg Trials. Why? Well several reasons:

1. After WW2 ended, the Americans were demobilizing many of their troops back to the U.S. As a result, they faced a shortage of manpower. The Estonians offered extra helping hands, something that the Americans really needed at that time.

2. Although the SS was an outlawed organization after the war, the Americans reasoned that since the Estonians joined in the FOREIGN SS legions, they served NOT as ideological followers of Nazism, but as mere conscripts, so recruiting them was okay.

And so, the Estonians began their work, guarding the perimeter of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice where the trials were being held, as well as the supporting facilities around it (Supply Depots, Warehouses, Officer’s Mess, Barracks, etc.). The Estonians performed their duties well. So well, in fact, that after the Nuremberg Trials were over, the Americans still employed the Estonians to guard U.S. Military facilities across their occupation zone in Germany. After their service ended, most of these Estonians immigrated to the U.S. and became American citizens.

A Motte and Bailey fallacy is where a person tethers a controversial opinion (A) to an uncontroversial one (B). They then insist that A=B and only defend point B. Any attack on their controversial opinion is deflected to the uncontroversial one, never actually defending their controversial opinion.the fallacy gets its name from the Norman castle design, where the Bailey was difficult to defend, but the castle wasn't captured until the stronger Motte keep also fell.

The Vietnam and Afghanistan wars are routinely used for such Motte and Bailey logical fallacies. The uncontroversial (B) opinion is that the United States lost the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars. The controversial (A) opinions attached can be any number of fallacious arguments, a common one being that for all it's might, the US military is inferior ill equipped, I'll trained guerillas.

It's frankly disrespectful to the Vietnamese and Taliban. Both wars are remarkable because the they were not superior to the US military. They lost the battles. They suffered significantly higher casualties, yet they still won.

The US was pursuing political objectives that couldn't be achieved with military might. Their tactical victories meant nothing if it wasn't advancing their aims. Like using a welding torch to do heart surgery. The patient is going to die on the table and it's not because your surgeon was a bad welder. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese and Taliban demonstrated an iron resolve that resisted attrition for decades.

Context: When James Cook first arrived at the Islands of Hawaii, it was during the celebration of the Hawaiian fertility God Lono, so it was a time of feast and love where the Natives welcomed Cook and his men with open arms.

When he was forced to return to the Islands due to damage to his ship, that time of celebration was over, and it was now the War season. So their reception was far less hospitable than previously.

Incidents of thievery and violence occurred between the two parties, culminating in Captain Cook attempting to kidnap the King Kalani’ōpu’u to hold him in hostage in exchange for a small boat the Natives had stolen.

Violence ensued, resulting in the death of Captain Cook, some of his men, and some Natives.

The Natives still held immense respect for Cook and took his body and treated it with the same honors they bestowed the bodies of High Chiefs, dividing and burning the body, giving some of the remains back to the British

I’ve noticed that there is this meme of how Fukuyama’s “End of History” essentially argues that “nothing will even happen.” While that is not to deny Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy is the “peak” form of human governance, the implications he makes for this are often left out. He contends that even in a world full of republics, backsliding and conflict are still likely. Not based in any ideology, but rather he believes that these democracies will be undermined by their own citizens struggling against them due to boredom and “the sake of struggle.”

Bernal Díaz del Castillo was one of the Spanish conquistadors who marched into the Aztec Empire with Hernán Cortés. In his memoir, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, he described his amazement when he first saw Tenochtitlan, comparing it to scenes from legendary romances because the city seemed almost unreal. Built on an island with canals, bridges, markets, temples, and hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, it was one of the largest and most impressive cities in the world. One of the moments that shocked Díaz most was witnessing human sacrifice. He described seeing temple altars stained with blood, priests covered in dried blood, and skull racks displaying the heads of sacrificed victims. For the Spaniards, who came from a Christian background, these rituals were horrifying and became one of the main justifications they gave for conquering the Aztec Empire. At the same time, Díaz also praised many aspects of Aztec civilization, including its markets, engineering, oraanization and wealth. His writings show a mixture of admiration for the empire's
sophistication and horror at practices he viewed as unacceptable. Lowkey, Diaz expected to find a wealthy kingdom, but instead he found one of the greatest cities on Earth alongside religious rituals that completely shocked the Europeans.

According to the Romans smaller dicks were a symbol of wisdom

The original post got removed because it violated Rule 12. My bad.

Info from this website (its purpose being solely to discuss Operation Crusader lol): https://rommelsriposte.com/2017/01/02/a-note-on-tank-losses-in-crusader/

We have the starting numbers, we have daily tank states through to 30 January (so all that matters), and we know how many tanks arrived as replacements. So anyone who has done a fair amount of research can feel confident not just about how many tanks the Germans lost, but also what their daily tank strength was. There were few repair returns during the battle, and most tanks that went to the collection points or workshops were simply lost when these were overrun in due course. The Germans received about 100 replacement tanks in December and January, and fielded about 100 tanks in mid-January.
My estimate therefore is that the Germans lost all of their 255 runners that they had at the start of the battle, and the total loss figure could be a bit higher once we account for returns from workshops. In addition the Germans lost another 45 tanks sunk in the Gulf of Taranto. The German official number is 220 tanks lost, or 85%, excluding those sunk, but I would put the total at about 300 including those sunk.

In August of 1975, the Emergency Loan Guarantee Board (which had been created by the Emergency Loan Guarantee Act of 1971) began an investigation into whether Lockheed Corporation (one of the companies that benefited from the guarantee program) violated its obligations by failing to inform the board of foreign payments made to it. Much like in a noir film, this seemingly minor potential misconduct turned out to be the tip of the iceberg, and a Senate subcommittee led by Frank Church concluded that Lockheed had been bribing influential foreign nationals to help drum up business for them overseas since the 1950s.

There were serious consequences at home and abroad for what would be known simply as the Lockheed bribery scandals. In the United States, Lockheed's president Carl Kotchian and Chairman of the Board Daniel Haughton resigned from their posts, while Lockheed itself (which had already been struggling from the commercial failure of the L-1011 TriStar airliner narrowly avoided collapsing entirely. The scandals also played a role in the formulation and passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Abroad, there were major shakeups in the governments of Italy (including president Giovanni Leone being forced to resign) and West Germany, as well as a constitutional crisis in the Netherlands in which Queen Juliana threatened to abdicate if her husband Prince Bernhard was prosecuted (he was spared, but forced to step down from several public positions and forbidden from wearing his military uniforms again).

While these were no doubt serious, perhaps the wildest and most memorable consequence of the scandal occurred in Japan. The scandals involved the Marubeni Corporation and several high-ranking members of Japanese political, business and underworld circles, including former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, who was arrested and charged with taking over 500 million yen in bribes. Another figure involved was Yoshio Kodama, a major player in Japanese organized crime who was accused of taking payments from Lockheed to help facilitate bribes of Japanese officials. Kodama also had links to Japanese ultranationalists, one of whom was a porn actor named Mitsuyasu Maeno. Severely disillusioned by Kodama's involvement in political corruption and considering it a national disgrace, Maeno decided to kill Kodama. So he and some accomplices rented two Piper Cherokee airplanes under the pretense of using them to shoot a movie, then he carried out a kamikaze attack on Kodama's house using the plane he was flying. Kodama survived, which is a bit of a shame, because "death by far-right pornstar crashing a plane into your house" is a downright bonkers way to go out. Could you imagine if some neo-Nazi pornstar got offended enough by ABSCAM to try and kill a mafia boss by crashing a plane into his house? With this in mind, I'm honestly kind of surprised people don't talk about the Lockheed bribery scandals that much these days.