America hasn't been a Protestant nation, or any sort of Christian nation, for a very long time. Doubtless a good deal longer than anyone on this board's been alive, myself certainly included. And in that extremely brief (by macrohistorical standards) window of time when it was, the fractious nature of Protestantism - with every different sect's religious worldview inevitably influencing their secular considerations - rendered full national unity inherently impossible in the long term. Yeah, it was fine for the first few decades when the Puritan-descended Yankees constituting the Federalist Party were just bickering about the viability of centrally-directed national development schemes with the Episcopalian, Cavalier-descended Democrat-Republicans, but obviously all that went tits up the instant the question of slavery ceased to be a merely academic discussion and one side started spawning William Garrisons & John Browns while the other pumped out John Calhouns & George Fitzhughs before the Founding Fathers were even all dead. (The decidedly non-Protestant Founding Father Charles Carroll, a slaveowner himself, lived long enough to witness Garrison's publishing of The Liberator for the first time.)

The attempt to found the nation on a marriage of multiple strands of Protestantism (Washington's Episcopalianism, Adams' Unitarian Congregationalism, etc.) with Enlightenment-era concepts of liberal individualism, minimal government & the promotion of free enterprise was worth the shot, but there's no denying that it comprehensively failed and the country they had in mind replaced with one more alien to their sensibilities than even Louis XIV's France would have been to an Egyptian farmer from Narmer's day within about 80-160 years. Depending on whether you consider the point where this Founders' vision was obliterated to be the Civil War, the ascent of the original Progressives and creation of the Federal Reserve, or the New Deal of course.

In the grand scheme of things, the Evangelical/Moral Majority attempt at a revival in the Reagan years was not some Great Awakening but a final frantic (and failed, very quickly at that) attempt at salvaging that which was already lost while the likes of Falwell and Robertson were still teenagers at their oldest. IIRC neither were even alive for the Modernist-Fundamentalist split in the 1920s, and then the poor bastards couldn't even overturn the ban on voluntary school prayer or reopen an opportunity to stave off baby-killing on a state level. When society crumbles and it's time to rebuild on the ashes, it's only natural to seek stronger materials for the foundation and structure - materials that have been proven to last millennia rather than less than two centuries - even if you intend to reuse as much of the old design as possible.

A legitimate ruler dictating the correct Christian orthodoxy and belief is how the core precepts of Christianity which Catholics, the Orthodox, most Protestants and varying numbers of Oriental Orthodox churches agree on came to be. For example the Trinity became a foundational pillar of Christian doctrine across many borders & creeds because Constantine the Great called the Council of Nicaea to debate it, then came down on the side of the Trinitarian faction. Every one of the other ecumenical councils considered legitimate & binding by the various Christian sects were called & their results enforced by the Emperors, who were regarded as the overall head of the Church between Constantine and Irene (when the Pope started going his own way while most of the other Pentarchs had fallen to the growing power of Islam).

Some level of state/worldly influence on the church is always inevitable, it comes with the territory of living in a fallen world & necessarily having to interact with secular society even if one becomes a monk (or a Protestant, Cromwell's Protectorate was hardly inclined toward religious freedom and the early US had established churches at the state level for decades - Massachusetts' lasted until 1833 for instance). The post-Constantine state church of the Roman Empire didn't do too badly (if anything it was probably the most trustworthy institution and the one most directly helpful to people at a time when the bureaucracy was rotten to the core, the army was made up increasingly of barbarians and the Senate couldn't make a single correct decision for an entire century) and the Byzantine theory of symphonia or state-church equality & complementarianism held up well when put into practice.

No, the real problem now is with the quality of the leaders. We have no Constantines today, only Caracallas and Honoriuses. And as can be seen here, we certainly have no Pope Urban II or Pius V but a Clement V, John XXII or Alexander VI come again.

Varies from hobby to hobby I'd say. As far as gaming goes, I think the infection really got going around the time of the Great Recession. Among other things Sark started up Feminist Frequency in 2009 and Tropes vs. Women in 2011, Bioware's last non-totally-pozzed games were from that time period (DAO - 2009 and ME2 - 2010), and the purge of known conservatives from gaming picked up steam not long after IIRC (ex. Martin O'Donnell, the original composer for Halo and an outspoken conservative, was drummed out around 2013-14).

Can't remember where exactly (it may have been KF) but I read a theory that Sarkeesian might've been the tip of the spear for Larry Fink et al. to sink the claws of ESG into vidya around the time of the Recession and try to puppeteer it into just another vector for prog agitprop. Knowing the results and how Feminist Frequency persisted for so long despite struggling to gain even 1k views on most of their videos for ages before finally shuttering for good only very recently (perhaps the ESG bux finally ran dry?), I'd believe it now.

I would imagine the rot must've set in much earlier with movies & comic books, if only because they were already mainstream entertainment mediums well before gaming really broke into the mainstream.

Nice to know that the DarthMod guy found commercial success with his own strategy games.

As far as early modern Total Wars go, I remember someone made a pretty good looking American Civil War mod for Napoleon TW (IIRC). There was a neat little trailer for one of their later releases, showing the 54th Massachusetts USCT battling Confederate cavalry & infantry set to the music of the final battle from the Matthew Broderick & Denzel Washington movie Glory (ironically they weren't storming Fort Wagner in that trailer, instead it looked like a field battle in a forest meadow and called to mind one of the earlier skirmishes from that film).

I mostly just really, REALLY miss the insane moddability of the first couple Total War games. LOTR: TW and Fourth Age Total War for RTW I and Divide and Conquer for M2TW remain the best Lord of the Rings strategy games I've played and even more fun than Battle for Middle-earth, which itself was already pretty awesome. The switch to the Warscape engine from Empire onward really tanked the modding scene (and probably hugely contributed to the death of sites like the .Org and TW Center which used to be the franchise's main modding nexuses), people are still trying but they can't quite measure up to the sheer ambition & variety of the mods for ye olde pre-Warscape Total Wars IMO.

Very true. I've heard that despite being the origin of as many as 75-80% of new recruits, military families have been doing their part to help the recruitment crisis along & telling their young men to stay well away from the armed forces. Here's hoping they keep that up.

They did, but I will only truly feel satisfaction over their demise when they're finally officially shuttered for good.

I can scarcely fathom the delusional arrogance it must take to assume that after the absolute woke onslaught of just the last decade alone, the Summer of Love, COVID lockdowns & vax mandates, the ongoing imprisonment and torture of the J6 boomers, etc. the elite can just offer up some good old-fashioned ads harkening back to better days (which they destroyed in the first place) and the demographics they've been shitting on, killing, suppressing and trying to replace will just go 'well OK then, all is forgiven'. Or that a couple of token concessions can win back their allegiance, as if for example Musk allowing people to name the Jew and call for the lynching of niggers on X which (while I'm sure it would be funny) will persuade the 'hillbillies' whose heritage & very existence those Jews have been demonizing and allowing the aforementioned niggers to brutalize without consequence for ages to come rushing back. Sheeit, it hasn't even been a month since they melted down the Charlottesville Lee statue, has it?

Hell, I can't even think of any actual concessions the globohomo regime could realistically make at this point that would actually be good enough to convince that white Christian male patriot demographic they need so badly that they are totally 100% sincere about changing for the better and you can trust them now, bros.

Well, maybe if Fed's board of governors get offered up as scapegoats for the economic crises of the past decades and are publicly executed on livestream.

And if Blackrock's houses, Bill Gates' farms, etc. get seized and parceled out to new enlistees as their enlistment bonus, entirely free of charge and unbound from mortgaging.

And if the border is closed, legal streams of immigration frozen indefinitely and efforts are made to round up every illegal alien in the country, so that they may be presented with the options of either expulsion or being machine-gunned on the spot.

And if Tim Wise, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, etc. get burned to death atop a pyre comprised of intersectional anti-racist works while the corpse of Noel Ignatiev, among others, is exhumed, cremated and the ashes fired out of cannons in the general direction of Israel.

And if feminist harridans and e-thots alike were subjected to a public walk of shame from one end of the country to another while all their works are burned in public squares, fags burn on the pyres with their own degenerate works, no-fault divorce outlawed and birth control banned as a public hazard.

And if chimpouts can once more be punished by the police loosing dogs & firehoses on the perpetrators at the minimum, or at maximum the NYT and Washington Post being forced to praise and publish celebratory postcards of whites having taken care of the evildoers themselves and digging trophies out of the latter's hanged and burnt corpses like in the old days.

And if the Ten Commandments stand proudly next to courthouses, while groups like ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation are buried under endless investigations, red tape and taxes until they dissolve, and the likes of Piss Christ's creator are assassinated only for their killers to never even be investigated.

And if Muslims committing terror attacks or Jews trying to subvert and undermine Christianity is answered with sanctioned pogroms, wherein Christians are allowed to destroy their communities and seize their lives & property. Etc, etc, you get the idea.

But you know what the chances TPTB will grant meaningful concessions like anything halfway to these are? Less than zero. They will resolve to hold on to Briseis even as their diverse armies falter before Ivan's and Wong's and Ismail's defense of the walls of the new Troy. A pity then they'll find that, as the article notes, Patroclus' death won't be enough to motivate the American Achilles to fight for long; or at all, considering their most likely Patroclus today won't be the good ol' soldier-boy's best buddy and cousin but probably one of the hive cities which are symbolic of everything wrong with America today. If another 9/11 hits NYC or a nuke goes off in LA (or even a mid-sized metropolis like say, Seattle) tomorrow, I expect the chuds of Wyoming or Alabama to cheer, and rightly so - the regime will have only vaporized their enemies with such a false flag.

Well and good. Stay in that fucking tent, chuds. Until about five minutes ago your overlord was boasting that Private Tyrone, Sergeant Shaniqua, Lieutenant Pablo and Brigadier-General Blackmoon (she/her) were oh so superior to you stale white males; let them prove that superiority now. And on the bright side, the more of these people get killed or maimed by Ismail's IEDs, Ivan's artillery or Wong's drones abroad, the easier things will be for you when the shooting starts at home.

Now that Jezebel's been thrown out the window and torn to shreds by the dogs, I hope Vice bites the dust next.

I thought Zelensky's a tribesman himself, and Khazaria the true original homeland of the Tribe...

I wish I could be surprised by the abortion referendum in OH, but this was always inevitable when you live in a decaying democracy where Christian values and the very idea of having moral standards have been spat upon since the 1960s at the absolute latest, and the average modern woman has been conditioned all her life to tolerate no limitation on her whims. Ah well. A people so addicted to their 'right' to kill off the next generation for their own convenience will get what they deserve, and arguably already are starting to.

There is fundamentally no democratic solution to that problem, except a collapse and consequent exploitation of the opportunity to strip away the franchise from any enemy who survives your wrath (provided you win, of course). Until then, best you can hope for is to execute the same infiltration of the institutions that the pro-life movement did to kill Roe in the first place, propagandize against Molochian sentiment to turn the culture away (a generational process) and get your pet judges to do to abortion 'rights' the same thing the Dems do every time an issue they don't like wins at the ballot, like gay marriage: play endless fuck-fuck games, rule against it at every possible turn, declare 'actually fuck the people's will, abortion is illegal no matter what because I say so' where they can get away with it and limit it as much as humanly possible on every possible grounds they can think of (no matter how baseless) in places where they can't.

Sauron is an aggressively industrializing, totalitarian leader who brooks no dissent from his horde of entirely disposable & interchangeable minions, and whose goal is to conquer all Middle-earth so that he might subordinate its peoples to his 'better' vision where (his) order and rationality (as he defines it) reign supreme. The Free Peoples meanwhile are a coalition whose members seek to maintain their independent kingdoms and traditions (in fact Aragorn's entire character arc centers around the restoration of the kingship over the Dunedain).

This is utterly ass-backwards, while Tolkien personally disdained allegory (especially when done this hamhandedly), if one must be drawn at all then it's pretty damn obvious that Sauron is a left-wing tyrant. The emphasis on industrialism and totalitarianism might be more akin to 19th-20th century leftism, but the core drive of centralism goes all the way back to the French Revolution, with the revolutionary regime starting the French Republics' various efforts to annihilate the regional autonomy & languages of regions like Brittany & Occitania. (Meanwhile the arch-traditionalist and integralist right, as exemplified by the likes of Action Francaise, supported the regions and in AF's case was led by a proud Occitan, Charles Maurras.)

People have been complaining about the usage of dishonorable tactics in warfare as far back as Paris using his bow to kill Achilles from a safe distance in the Trojan War.

Funny enough, in this particular case, if you look at Judaism's history they've been pretty much always averse to fighting up-close and personal with the enemy (the 'honorable' way, as agreed upon by most pre-gunpowder civilizations from the Mycenaean Greeks to medieval Christian Europeans & Muslim Saracens alike). David taking down Goliath with a sling is only the most obvious example. The Tribe of Benjamin's elite regiment was mentioned in the Book of Judges to be composed entirely of left-handed slingers. The Israelites aren't mentioned as using war chariots (the heavy cavalry of that period, at least in the Middle East - cataphracts wouldn't be a thing for many centuries after the fall of Israel and Judah) in any significant number ever IIRC, it's always their enemies who are fielding chariots against their own comparatively lightly-equipped forces. And they famously fought as skirmishers with a heavy reliance on guerrilla tactics against the Seleucids (successfully) as well as the Romans (to much less success).

Even if one subscribes to the Khazar origin hypothesis for today's Jews this still holds up, since those guys were (like most nomadic hordes) primarily horse-archers whose strategy relied on raiding & avoiding contact with the foe as much as possible. The Jews have been reliant on ranged weapons and/or subversive tactics (either militarily like the Maccabees' campaign of night raids & hit-and-run attacks, or socioeconomically as has also been well documented) to win their wars for basically as long as records about them have existed, Samson and David's gibborim (elite royal guards) really stand out as anomalies for being brute-force heroes more in line with non-Semitic civilizations' sensibilities who explicitly wielded melee weapons or just used their bare hands to defeat their enemies.

I prefer the idea of the Kaiser stomping the militantly godless French Republic and Perfidious Albion into the ground, before there are any Soviets at all even.

Yeah sure, '''''tragically'''''

Tbf, not only was Arminius from a wholly different period 300 years before the great barbarian migrations, but he wasn't quite an immigrant or an immigrant's descendant like Stilicho & Aetius. Just the prince of a pro-Roman tribe who took Roman money & fought with them long enough to learn all their tricks. His victory at Teutoburg overshadows him later getting his ass beat into the ground by Germanicus (which is why the Romans had provinces called 'Germania' into the 5th century, some emperors even made Trier their capital from time to time - most famously Constantine the Great), and most of his own family fought against him. His tribe, the Cherusci, became tame under his nephew, a dude so pro-Roman that he was literally named Italicus.

I would liken Arminius to basically a Germanic Osama bin Laden, really. Petty royalty who was on the payroll of a more civilized great power to fight other savages; came to despise said great power that he turned against it in dramatic fashion; was opposed by his own kindred; eventually got rekt by the aforementioned great power; and yet that great power can at best only maintain an indirect hold over his homeland through puppet regimes rather than directly conquering it.

A fully assimilated half-German (specifically Vandal) second-gen immigrant almost saved Rome, if not for an out-of-nowhere pain train capped off by the Senate engineering a coup running him & his entire family over between 406 and 408 - Flavius Stilicho. Another half-German (in that case probably Gothic) saved the Roman world from Attila the Hun himself on the Catalaunian Plains - Flavius Aetius. (His father was described as a general from the province of Scythia, today's Dobruja split between Romania & Bulgaria, but by the late 4th century when that father would've been around the province had already been lost to the Goths in all but name.)

I would love to meet whatever son of a modern Somali migrant and the clueless AWFL who shrieked for his every crime to be excused can even remotely measure up to those men's quality. I suspect, though, that I will be waiting a very, VERY long time for such a surprise. To say the least.

Where's that meme of the smug atheist saying something along the lines of 'well no of course my supremely enlightened self don't believe in any of that hokey magical BS about a sky daddy, but you do, so maybe if I throw quotes from your precious scripture at you it'll get you to do what I want'? Because that's what I think of every time I hear or see a leftist try to lecture others about Christianity.

The Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, is the proud granddaughter of another Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and associates with Ukrainian ultranationalists, up to & including personally holding the black-and-red flag of the UPA (the only WW2-era Ukrainian faction even worse than the literal SS volunteers). There's a very good chance that the Liberals up to the Prime Minister's Office knew full well what Yaroslav Hunka was and approved this whole shebang under the belief that people would be too stupid to notice and/or it'd all blow over in a weekend without any real consequences. Since things didn't pan out that way, they're now throwing Rota under the bus as their scapegoat.

The Soviets had a habit of stealing grain from Ukraine to starve Ukrainians into submission, the Holodomor being the most infamous occasion (but it wasn't the first such famine, there was one in the early 20s right after the Soviets conquered Ukraine for the first time as well). Like the various other nationalities trapped under Bolshevik tyranny, including the Russians themselves, the Ukrainians had very good reason to want the Reds dead.

As for why the Germans would have recruited these guys, the Germans were starting to backslide as of 1943 (when the SS Galizien was established - by this time Op. Barbarossa had failed to achieve its intended goals and the Germans had definitively lost at Moscow & Stalingrad, and they had also failed to cut off the Soviet oil supply from Baku in the Caucasus) and needed additional manpower wherever they could find it. Had they been more reasonable they would've recruited Ukrainians and various other nationalities from 1941 onward when the latter were prepared to greet them as liberators, though.

Yes, they did also fight non-Soviet forces on the Eastern Front (they refused to go to the Western Front). Key word, fight. The SS Galizien didn't devote 98% of its time & resources on murdering defenseless civilians, which puts them one small rung above the UPA.

Well I guess it could be worse, at least the SS Galizien generally fought & died hard against the Soviets. They could've honored a UPA vet (the black & red flag guys) instead, those were the guys who were good at barbarically butchering Polish civilians & Ukrainians not as deranged as themselves but were terrible at actual combat against both the Soviets and Polish Home Army.

On a more serious note, this was inevitable. Not only is there a significant Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, but Trudeau's right-hand woman and most likely successor as leader of the Liberals is Chrystia Freeland, the granddaughter of a Nazi collaborator who was perfectly happy to roll with that legacy and branded any attempt to call her out on it (or her association with Ukrainian ultranationalists in general) as Russian disinformation. If you dare, do try to imagine Hillary Clinton, but she has actual ethnic investment in the Ukrainian war & also has cottage-cheese thighs that she likes to flaunt as though she were a 20 y/o supermodel - and you'll have a good idea of what Freeland's like. You see, while Canadian nationalism may be deader than the dinosaurs, that doesn't mean people can't bring their own ethnic ties & nationalisms into this country with them, be it Freeland with Ukraine or Sikhs & Hindus with grudges against one another.

The modern liberal is a shameless hypocrite par excellence, capable of maintaining innumerable contradictory positions for the sake of power & their agenda without batting an eye at the cognitive dissonance, and the big-l Liberals of Canada have perfected that art to an even greater degree than most. They already didn't give a flying shit about Trudeau sacking his First Nations minister for refusing to be influenced into tampering with a criminal case against one of his pet corporations even as he was bleating about residential schools back in 2019, so unfortunately this isn't even going to dent their support for that cretin, nor will it stop them from carrying out the usual performative hysterics about white supremacy whenever they feel like it.

Nobody voted for the mass immigration policies imposed across the entire West and now increasingly Japan too. Hell, even California voted against gay marriage when given the opportunity, and Japan would likely have done the same if a vote was held on the matter. But the judicial & political establishment (as if there's a difference at this point) decided actually no, your vote doesn't count if you vote the wrong way. Or in Japan's case, to just skip the show vote entirely (presumably to avoid another Prop 8-esque embarrassment) and get their pet judges to mandate it immediately at Rahm Emanuel's command.

I would gladly take the blunt dictatorship of Sulla or Cromwell or Hussein over what we have now. At least you could trust those guys to be honest about being dictators, they wouldn't insult my intelligence by pretending to give me a choice in whether or not to participate in my own slavery.

Yessiree. The history of the world is replete with deranged tyrants who were only able to attain tyrannical power by whipping up at least enough of a mob to make it seem like they had the vast majority of the populace on their side (thus justifying their rule as a glorious expression of what Rousseau would describe as the 'general will') & to cow all the opposition they hadn't lynched yet into intimidation. And without that mob behind them, they either can't get into power in the first place, or their bloody works won't survive long after they die anyway.

Whether it's Cleon screaming for ever more blood to be shed in Athens, Robespierre's thriving guillotine business in Paris, Lenin commanding massacre after massacre from Moscow, or the present American establishment justifying their atrocities from DC with the supposed need to defend Our Democracy™. Every single one of these tyrants understood one thing: without the cloak of democracy to sway the mob onto your side, naked force can entrench despotism for only so long (as Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, for example, demonstrates). But you get enough of the people to participate in their own slavery and to impose chains on others, and you can really build up a killing machine with catastrophic effects that echo for generations.

Exceedingly unlikely. Poland tried something like that with Czechoslovakia right after the Munich Agreement, and it was considered the single dumbest thing they did before WW2 broke out. Among what I've learned from all my years observing autistic slapfights over history between Slavic users on the Internet, one of the things that never changes is that the Russians still love bringing that episode up when the Poles (or any other Slav/ex-Soviet nationality, like Latvians) slam them with memories of Molotov-Ribbentrop.

Now all that said, Ukraine would deserve it. I can think of very few nations which have received pretty much their entire GDP's worth in aid only to show such ridiculous ingratitude toward their benefactors, from Musk to Poland. Just like with welfare queens on the home front, it seems the people who get the most free shit also very rapidly reveal themselves to be the most entitled and ungrateful.

I didn't think the closed-mouth vocalization theory was even new. I watched vids where people were talking about it and trying to simulate what that might've sounded like from 4-5 years ago. Tbh, the idea of a T-Rex that communicates via this forest-shaking low rumbling noise is one I consider more intimidating than that of a T-Rex bellowing & roaring as it thunders through the woodland, if real it'd be the mark of a creature that pretty much plays its own horror OST when out hunting.