(Part 3) Top products from r/polandball

You might want to check out Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer for a very thorough explanation of US redneck culture and its origins. Fischer traces four distinct British cultural folkways as they are transplanted and adopted in the United States. Originally regional, these cultures spread across the country as it expanded.

Fischer explains that Southern backcountry culture is derived from "Scots-Irish" (actually an intermingling of Irish, Scottish, and English) people on the borders of Northern England, Southern Scotland, and in North Ireland from the 1600s.

Some markers of the Southern backcountry culture are honor, clan-orientation, a tendency toward a warrior pride, and supporting willfulness in children. This is a result of the centuries of warfare in the borderlands where the original Scots-Irish settlers came from.

This is quite distinct from, say, Virginia culture, which was all about gentrification, hierarchy, the "gentleman" class, wealthy plantations, and the like. The other two cultural traditions traced are New England Puritan culture and Delaware-valley Quaker culture. All of these traditions are currently still regionally expressed and have spread to varying degrees across parts of the US.

http://www.amazon.com/For-All-Tea-China-Favorite/dp/0143118749

I am a little bit of a tea fanatic - for a yank - and also a nerd. This book is a great read on the subject - really fascinating stuff. Imperialism, drugs, botanical history, industrial espionage, Scottish dude passing himself off as Chinese...

They made better history back then.

Inspired by reading the first half of Forgotten Armies, a book about Britain's WWII in Asia. I was mostly prompted by one passage that mentioned British soldiers stationed in India rioting when they saw some Hindu swastikas used as decorations. Apparently they thought the Indians were expressing sympathy for the Nazis..

As for the first part, it's just a joke about how easily Britain was routed from Singapore, Burma, and elsewhere. The "little fellows" line is in reference to Sir Shenton Thomas, Governor of Singapore who used that term to describe the Japanese who would easily be defeated by the British.

> Where do you getting this from?

Largely from this book.

> Jogaila married Jadwiga to ensure Lithuania gets Christianized and stops Teutonic Order from attacking us, which they didn't, sadly, besides it was great start up path for Polish-Lithuanian alliance since they both had common enemy - Teutonic Order.

That's true as well, and was listed as the second of the reasons given in the book.

> Lithuania was never secondary culture where are you getting this bs? It just what happens when you're smallest of neighbours it was a natural process like in most nations that unify.

...yeah, that's basically what I said. Their position, as the smallest of the neighbors, meant that their culture remained held down by the dominating slavic culture.

I just finished reading this book on Chinese history and highly recommend it to anyone looking for a primer on the subject. One interesting fact that could be used by u/Kimiimar0 in the next version is that the voyages (all of them) were led by a Palace Eunuch called Zheng He who became a part of the bureaucracy after being captured from his native place in South-Eastern China, being castrated and being packed off to Beijing as a 11 year old.

If anyone wants to read more about this and similar phenomena, read Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930

Haha sorry! I was making a lame joke. Exorbitant Privilege is the title of a book by economist Barry Eichengreen. In it, he argues that the status of the American Dollar as a reserve currency means that it makes its goods and exports more expensive to export and thus damages its economy. In tradeoff, it acquires the ability to essentially borrow as much as it requires to finance its deficits.

In the same sense, I think the status of the United States as the sole superpower is a privilege. It allows the United States to dictate policy around the world as it sees fit with less input from other nations, certainly less than any other superpower in the history of the world has. However, that comes with the implicit responsibility for the state of the world, including what wars break out and how nations interact with one another. As the foremost state in the world order, other states will blame you for whatever the outcome of a situation is. Thus you are indeed damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Now I've been out of Polandball for a while, so in return I don't know and am curious what "pulling a De Gaulle" is!

The quote actually isn't made up entirely, but it's usage regarding WW1 is. According to historian Richard Connaughton in Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear, the phrase was used by a British reporter in reference to the Kuropatkin's Russian Army. Only in the interwar period was it wrongly associated with the British Army in WW1.

There's a really interesting book on that incident.

That's because it's a physical book.

I'll just leave this here.

Don't thank me, I've been completely useless.

EDIT: a quick flick through my uni library database returned this book which might be a good starting point.

Read The Hot Zone. Seriously. Do it now.

Take your first world problems elsewhere, peon

MM Lee says we are first world what

As I said above, Argentina considered Paraguay a rebel province, much like China sees Taiwan. They were both part of the River Plate Virreynate, and Buenos Aires was its capital. After independence in 1811, the paraguayans did their own thing and formed a new nation.

Borders in southamerica were not fixed on those times, and there was little allegiance to a nation, especially in Argentina, with the fight between Federales and Unitarios dividing the country.

For Argentina, after the Unitario victory, annexing Paraguay was just a matter of returning a troublesome province to the fold.

Brazil had constant limit problems on their western frontiers - that is to say, they were expansionist fucks, and the independent brazilians kept this policy. See the Cisplatine province - now Uruguay.

As the treaty of Tordesillas divided the Americas into spanish and portuguese spheres of influence, Paraguay was smack at the limit, and had fought against portuguese Bandeirantes since the jesuit missions time. From the paraguayan perspective, Brazil was encroaching once more into Paraguay's land. There are no borders in the jungle, and Brazil was determined to push on until met with resistance. They got it.


> One of the major problems was again the matter of borders, particularly Paraguay's northeastern frontier. This contained little of value, was virtually unpopulated, and produced only mate, which few Brazilians had a taste for. Nevertheless, the latter were convinced of their legal right to the territory, and this had nearly led to war
in 1855, when Lopez expelled the garrison of a Brazilian fort in the disputed zone.

> Brazil sent a large squadron to the River Plate; gaining the permission of
Argentina, this proceeded up the Parana toward Corrientes. The British minister reported that Lopez was "making extensive warlike preparations" and seemed "ill disposed to listen to any reasonable suggestions in favor of a peaceable and moderate policy."1 Lopez ordered a partial evacuation of Asuncion and sent the treasury and church valuables into the interior.

>In fact, Lopez's statements were bluster, and he actually seems to have been terrified by the Brazilian threat and prepared to back down to their demands. It was his son, Francisco Solano, who strengthened his resolve and who managed to persuade the Brazilians to leave the majority of their squadron at Corrientes and proceed upriver to Asuncion with just one ship. By linking the border issue with that of freedom of navigation of the rivers, Lopez managed to secure a favorable treaty, allowing Brazil rights of passage up the Paraguay River to its interior province of Mato Grosso, in exchange for a frontier set at the line of
Paraguayan demands. Predictably, the Brazilian government was furious with its envoy and refused to ratify the treaty.

>The following year a compromise was reached, with the boundary question put on ice for six years. By 1862, at the expiration of this period, during which a solution should have been reached, tension between the two countries rose again.

>Yet no effort was made to appoint commissioners or deal with an issue that could clearly lead to a serious breakdown in relations between them.

Leuchars - To the Bitter End: Paraguay and the War of the Triple Alliance -pp 23-24

>C'mon the situation of the time was very easy to go wrong, just because one Serbian was nationalistic doesn't mean that factor was that important. Saying his actions on its own were that big of a reason for the war is gross oversimplification. The whole situation was rigged to explode at that time, overarching reasons being the many diffrent alliances between the European powers and the eagerness of some European rulers to go to war. I'd say nationalism was important for rallying the people to go to war though.



I'd have up disagree. The black hand had members and supporters in the upper echelons of the Serbian government and military sending then arms and turning a blind eye to a regionally destabilizing terrorist group who were calling for the annexation of Austro-hungarian territories. It wasn't one Serbian, but an active quasi government supported terrorist group running arms to separatists on the A-H side of the border.

When assessing in a limited timeframe the start of the first world war cannot solely be blamed on either Austria-Hungarian bellicosity or Serbian nationalism, but a mixture of the two. Arguing that the world was a ticking time bomb or whatever and anything could have set a war off, and there was an inevitable walk to war due to a web of alliances ignores the facts that no matter how likely one may posit that war was in the summer of 1914, the war which happened was started by a group of Serbian nationalist terrorists conspiring to assassinate the Austrian heir apparent in Sarajevo. While the wholesale expansion of the war was generally due to the rather cavalier actions of Germany and the alliances and such which drew Russia and Britain and company into the conflict, the initial war was a regional conflict between Austria Hungary and Serbia. When one relegates nationalism to simply rallying 'the people' to war one ignores the political changes and new nations which were created after the war, a result of the widespread nationalism at the time. I'd recommend this as a source on the beginning of the war. Hew Strachan is quite a good reflection of the current historiography of the war. If you're at all interested in the first world war's beginning this book is a must read.