The very many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XXII

[bhsup]

They are one of the best milk dunking cookies available.

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

They are one of the best milk dunking cookies available.

That actually makes a fair bit of sense. I'd imagine that dryness would be useful when dunking and the gap for the cream allows the milk to penetrate on four sides instead of your standard two.

 

[Synobun]

I think oreos are awful both dry and wet. Double chocolate chip represent.

 

[phoenix_sprite]

I also think that oreos are awful but if we're talking about store bought cookies then I'll have to go the stereotypical route and pick maple leaf cookies!

 

[Synobun]

I also think that oreos are awful but if we're talking about store bought cookies then I'll have to go the stereotypical route and pick maple leaf cookies!

I feel somewhat less Canadian than I felt five minutes ago. I should have said maple leaf cookies, too.

... Maybe both?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I don't often hear people confuse the two, partly because wienerschnitzel is not too common in the US. But you'll definitely notice the difference between schnitzel and wurst when you see and eat them, and wienerschnitzel's really good.

First, VR was talking about the word uber, not weinersnitzel. Second, I never ever confused weinersnitzel with brat, nor did anyone else in this thread despite owen's insistence on repeating the difference between brat and snitzel.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Why do Americans go crazy for Oreos? They're dry, it's not like it's top shelf chocolate and the creamy centre is not that creamy. And it's not like you guys are lacking when it comes to good confectionary.

In Britain Oreos have been recently introduced, like in the past couple of years, and people are talking about them like it's an old favourite that's always been around.

 

[Farm Boy]

Yea, Oreos are kinda meh unless you dunk them. Plus they're great for fidgeting with while eating them. Do you just bite this one? Do you twist off one of the wafers and eat the one with the cream second thereby making the second part more delicious than the first? Do you twist off a wafer and lick the cream out straight? I dunno. They aren't my fav and I have no idea when I last intentionally acquired Oreos, but they're kinda ubiquitous and not terrible for store cookies. Plus it's hilarious that the "low cal" Oreos are the same cookie with less cream in the middle and the double stuffed are obviously the opposite.

 

[bhsup]

First, VR was talking about the word uber, not weinersnitzel. Second, I never ever confused weinersnitzel with brat, nor did anyone else in this thread despite owen's insistence on repeating the difference between brat and snitzel.

Actually, the question works for either

 

[hobbsyoyo]

WELL THEN FINE I'M JUST A WEINER CONFUSED BRAT-FACE.

 

[cardgame]

There are much better store-bought cookies than Oreos available. I must say, however, that when dunked in milk there's not much I know of that can compare.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Chips Ahoy in milk?

 

[shadowplay]

Chips Ahoy are the most disgusting factory cookies I've ever eaten.

I don't know if you have them in the States, but President's Choice makes fantastic chocolate chip cookies.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I never knew Oreos were supposed to be dunked in milk. Didn't stop me from enjoying one every now and then.

 

[shadowplay]

Cookies 'n cream, man. It's amazing.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Where I live you can buy ginger-mollasses cookies from one of the local bakeries. Theyre pretty good. Ginger cookies are too spicy and crunchy, and mollasses cookies are too sweet and chewy, but put together it's just pretty good.

 

[Dachs]

At what point does a large population of people calling something a particular word that really may not be accurate make it an acceptable use of that word?

VR, you refuse to refer to the aboriginal peoples of the North American continent as "Native Americans". Your comment therefore smacks of the teensiest bit of hypocrisy.

---

More questions on the Eurasian War timeline that I wrote a year and a half ago! And more answers. So:

Alright so finishing up with the alternate history. Interesting geopolitical situation, particularly Russia/Germany relationship and whats going on in China/Japan, however:

1. I find the Communist Iberia hard to buy. You have some sort of quasi-fascist Weygard France and they're not going to swoop in and crush Iberia? Perhaps Britain and Germany would even help. In real life the Entente intervened in the Russian civil war, I mean Germany, America, Britain, and Japan all got involved in that. And Britain and the US were far removed. With communists on their doorstep I find it hard to believe the UK and France wouldn't shut that craziness down.

Be careful about how fast you think this stuff can happen. Weygand was elected in 1927, and the PPF forced through the new authoritarian constitution in 1928. It's now year-end 1931. Three years of almost nonstop armaments still hasn't totally put the French in a position to invade whomever they like without repercussions. Think about where Nazi Germany was in 1936 in OTL. Now, the French aren't nearly as far behind as the Germans were due to the Versailles restrictions, and their economy hasn't been turned into a colossal ****tastrophe like the Germans' had been, but still. It's hard to make war from a standing start.

France was not really ready for a war with the new Commune in 1927, when it would've made the most sense to begin active intervention (because you just know that various powers were funneling cash and arms to their chosen proxies in the civil war during the actual war itself), especially because the capture of Lisbon coincided with the worst part of the riots and election-rigging and gang wars that helped bring Weygand to power in the first place. And nobody else was in anything like a condition to intervene either, except the British and Germans, and I covered their respective situations in the TL itself. The Chamberlain government was embroiled in a series of nasty scandals, knew that the Commune posed little real threat to Gibraltar, and was worried about its potential inability to successfully extricate itself from an Iberian war and about the potential for an increasingly unstable and authoritarian France to make some sort of gain in Iberia if the Commune were broken up. And Kühlmann's government tried to get the credits from the Reichstag, but as noted, this caused a constitutional crisis in Germany that made it relatively incapable of intervening anytime soon.

But the general expectation of the setting was that Iberia would be a problem to be solved by the Great Powers relatively early on. Perhaps a way for France to show off its shiny, growing new military, or for Germany to begin to assert some sort of Continental hegemony, or for somebody to bog down in a nasty peninsular war redux that would leave them vulnerable to attack from another quarter. I lampshaded that in the text of the TL itself with the comment that Iberia's chief strength was its weakness and poverty, which made it little of a threat to anybody and a pain in the ass to invade, and then made that explicit in the footnotes.

2. Disunited Italy, would it really be divided for any meaningful length of time before reunifying? I mean I suppose political divisions can persist for awhile, look at North Korea and South Korea, but a Papal States dominant over Italy is I feel a bridge too far. The commies are going to revolt before long and they'll be hanging priests in the street.

Remember, the idea of Italian unification still hadn't totally taken hold in the country by the time of the war, revolution, and the crushing military defeats of 1918. Many of the most obviously avowed nationalists went underground in the short term, were gassed by the Franco-Bavarian expeditionary force, or faced firing squads at the hands of the Popolari after the 'restoration of order'. There is a sense that many of the regional political divisions are very artificial - north, center, and south is the most popular idea for a potential restructuring of Italy. Nationalist sentiment still exists in the form of the Weygand-backed Arditi, and the Popolari command a sort of clerical-nationalist support that has made them a firm ally of the Habsburg monarchy.

For much of the 1920s, the federation was sustained largely by the bloody restoration of order in 1919-21, by a common sentiment that a completely unified Italy simply hadn't worked out for anybody except the richest Piedmontese barons and industrialists, and by the concessions to nationalism that the Great Powers permitted. This has begun to break down, in significant part because of the economic problems that have badly discredited the limited and circumscribed government that the Concert set up. But it hasn't broken down completely. Italy as of 1932 is in a sort of ferment, with at the very least a moderate amount of violence probable, but the federation idea is by no means doomed, especially if it successfully perches on Austrian bayonets.

And finally, despite the rhetoric of the anticlericalists of the Third Republic, the new federation really isn't/wasn't the Papal States writ large. The Popolari were historically a mass organization with an enormous base of support among Italians themselves in the 1920s, and in TTL it is even more of a unified party with wide support. It's not exactly Christian democracy after the fashion of the postwar European movement of OTL, but a bit more like the Zentrum of Germany with the salient difference that cardinals are actually participating in the party with more or less open backing from the pontiff himself. And it certainly doesn't amount to the badly-governed, autocratic, backwards, depressing unholy mess that the Petrine state was in the nineteenth century.

3. France is Nazi Germany, you mentioned yourself France can't match German manpower. I'm not sure how good the flip of circumstance works. I've seen Paradox scenarios where you have France being fascist and overrunning all kinds of territory. Hell Kaiserreich, with a commie France. No doubt there were fascistesque groups in France like Action Francaise and others. As you said though rampant militarism and aggressive industrialization is unsustainable. I really can't envision a French blitz of Germany. However I can see a French intervention in Iberia, perhaps detaching significant border areas after unseating the commies.

The changed circumstances can be overstated. Geopolitically, they are in a somewhat similar situation to Nazi Germany: frustration with the results of the last war, previous democratic institutions discredited and eventually swept away by revolution and corrupt bargaining, autarkic economic ideas fueled by rearmament. Politically, apart from the loose antidreyfusard/antisemitic stance of the French Right, which isn't nearly as virulent as what even the early NSDAP would propose about Jews, the government is much more of a hybrid between the Gaullist Republic of OTL and a more garden-variety military dictatorship than any comparison with the Hitlerite mass party state. It's emphatically not very close to Fascist at all, much less National Socialist.

Yes, in terms of resources and straight-up production, France is not exactly a match for Germany. It does not have a snowball's chance in hell of making war on the entire rest of the world like the Hitlerites tried to do. But only a very foolish player would attempt to do that. The French have all sorts of potential options as far as allies go, and isolating individual enemies is also a very strong possibility. After all, before the death of Nikolai II, there was a sort of ghostly Austro-Russo-French alliance against Germany, with Britain hovering on the sidelines in a vaguely pro-German role but probably not a potential cobelligerent, let alone ally. That's a very favorable combination for France, and the possibility for that alliance still exists in 1932.

And even in a one-on-one duel with Germany, it's not totally clear that France would lose. The courses of wars don't always match up with population or production figures: just look at Russia in the OTL First World War. I can very much imagine France successfully defeating the German Army by itself. Of course, there's an element of the "ok, then what?" to that sort of campaign, as I brought up numerous times during my description of Foch's grand offensive in 1919. But just because Foch - and OTL Ludendorff - lacked a good plan, does not mean that Weygand - and OTL Manstein - would also lack a good plan.

Finally what interested me the most is where Germany goes from here? Is Mitteleuropa and the economic union possible?

It's been bandied about by a few men, but many of them are marginalized and discredited on the extreme right, or dead, or both (e.g. Hugo Stinnes). The Austrians aren't interested and would actively sabotage such a project in their effort to gain more political and economic independence from Germany and start acting like an actual Great Power again. At this point it would probably take another apocalyptic war, either against Austria or in which Germany is allied to Austria and Vienna becomes super-dependent on Germany again, for anybody to seriously bandy about economic union, let alone political union.

And Russia, man I really want to see what happens in Russia. So Bolsheviks crushed, but surely the left will rise again. And the right too. Because Russia has become a German economic colony. No patriotic Russian will stand for that for long. That will be quite interesting to see.

Yeah, Russia is one of those states that has an interesting choice to make. A few countries, like Germany, the Chinas, and to a lesser extent France, are fairly set in stone in terms of the sort of goals their governments will pursue, but the Americans, Brits, Japanese, and especially the Russians have fairly wide vistas of choice ahead. I wanted to have some situations in which players could impose a limited policy vision on their states, give them more of a personal stamp and touch and create a sense of attachment. And Russia's choice is so stark, with the kadets and another try at constitutional government on the one hand and the enigmatic, sinister Purishkevich and his Black Hundreds on the other. Socialism is by no means dead either, as you mentioned, but I have a hard time envisioning much of a role for a real Russian Left without an apocalyptic war.

I know less about China but the Republic vs. Qing is interesting. Yet I have to wonder how long that will last. China hasn't often had sustainable divisions in its history. For whatever that is worth.

China has, in fact, spent more years 'divided' than 'together', and that's if you count the years spent in a dynasty that did not control Dongbei, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, or Formosa as 'together'. It only seems unlikely today because the modern Chinese state, ever since the Xinhai Revolution, has successfully imposed and expanded its nationalist vision of an eternal Zhongguo, a sort of amalgamation of civic and ethnic nationalism. (A world in which "Chinese" encompasses the speakers of dozens of different languages and yet coexists with the notion of hanjian is a truly weird one.)

I did sort of angle things in the TL towards a burgeoning Republic with increasing military, economic, and industrial power, and an extremely sound political foundation, compared very favorably with a Qing state that is riven by political, social, and military factions and struggling to compete. The expectation and likelihood in that case would be that the Republic would successfully launch the NRA across the Chang Jiang and finally wipe the Manju barbarians off the map. But anything could happen. That's what Jiang's state looked like to a lot of people in the early 1930s of OTL, and again in 1945 and 1946. Japan, Russia, and to a lesser extent the Americans are all wild cards. And as demonstrated by the Eurasian War itself, the Qing government and the Beiyang Army have been prematurely written off before.

 

[bhsup]

Well, I'm native too. It isn't that they are not, but that they want the term to be exclusively used for them.

 

[Dachs]

Well, I'm native too. It isn't that they are not, but that they want the term to be exclusively used for them.

I have a great deal of sympathy for your viewpoint and I also think that using the term "Native Americans" is suboptimal, but I'm not the one saying that collective insanity can supersede etymology and the actual definition of a given word. You are.

 

[bhsup]

Cold war USSR was communist

But yeah okay I see what you're saying. I admit I have a few hangups that contradict my view overall on this. Nobody's perfect. Hell, even Reagan gave amnesty...