Forum
A place to discuss topics/games with other webDiplomacy players.
Page 1173 of 1419
FirstPreviousNextLast
obiwanobiwan (248 D)
26 Jun 14 UTC
Worst Non-Sitcom TV Show You've Ever Watched? (4 Episodes Minimum)
Friends were raving about this Netflix show, "Orange is the New Black." Watched. ..It's awful. Wall to wall. The main lead (not the actress herself, she seems to be trying, at least) is like the adult equivalent of Bella Swann meets Every Yuppie Character Ever. Every character's a stereotype. Every guy is a perv, sex-crazed ass, douche, OR just has no life whatsoever. The writing is as bad as I've seen...and yet, this won awards? xD So, worst shows?
73 replies
Open
NigeeBaby (100 D(G))
25 Jun 14 UTC
Is it just me or .....
..... is there a lot of death and destruction going on at the minute.
91 replies
Open
ssorenn (0 DX)
26 Jun 14 UTC
JMO = King Mod
We all want to thank JMO for his service to the site.

No crying from the Mods!!!!!!!!!
23 replies
Open
glisbao (185 D)
25 Jun 14 UTC
Populism and Democracy
I've heard in here that populism is the plague that affects democracy (the topic praising appeasement). I would like people to elaborate on the subject - how does populism undermine the democratic principles, and what can we learn about this in history?
56 replies
Open
ArmaGGedon (100 D)
26 Jun 14 UTC
live game
hi, someone to anime live game :P
3 replies
Open
NigeeBaby (100 D(G))
26 Jun 14 UTC
The link between having a large penis and self-confidence
Here is something you guys should all know something about, please share your thoughts if you've got the balls to do so :-)
11 replies
Open
peterwiggin (15158 D)
25 Jun 14 UTC
Man walks into McDonald's with knife in back
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-mcdonalds-knife-back-20140625-story.html
12 replies
Open
rayanking (0 D)
25 Jun 14 UTC
join fast victory 4 $$$
it's a great and a live game, it cost only 10 D and in classic map. So let the game start.:)
2 replies
Open
jmo1121109 (3812 D)
18 Jun 14 UTC
Many open games
Today's number is 38. I suggest everyone check out some of the open games. Post here with any games you take over for the next 48 hours and you'll get reimbursed for them. PM me for anonymous games. Games with more then 1 banned cheater will probably be cancelled so don't join them.
58 replies
Open
Putin33 (111 D)
25 Jun 14 UTC
Appeasement: unfairly maligned strategy?
I've been reading quite a bit about British & French foreign policy at the turn of the century, and it seems like appeasement (reduction of tensions through concessions) has gotten an unnecessarily bad reputation.
19 replies
Open
Tolstoy (1962 D)
22 Jun 14 UTC
(+1)
Can atheists believe in free will?
If our consciousness is simply a product of the mushy 3-dimensional circuit board we call a brain, governed entirely by the fixed and unchanging laws of physics and chemistry, is there any kind of free will? Or are all our decisions in life predetermined, like a computer program running through its code, simply responding to various inputs?
126 replies
Open
rojimy1123 (597 D)
25 Jun 14 UTC
Taking over CDs
I have recently taken over 2 positions in games where players left. I am wondering why my profile says I haven't taken over CD's at all.
8 replies
Open
obiwanobiwan (248 D)
20 Jun 14 UTC
Again--This is NOT a Christian Country...
http://news.yahoo.com/republicans-obama-must-defend-christian-values-192212780--election.html Christians live here--AND Jews, AND Muslims, AND Buddhists and Hindus and Atheists (fastest growing group!) AND dozens of others (including, hey, all those Native American tribes and religions...many of which were criminalized in part until the 1970s)...WHY? Why must Obama defend the values of a specific sect, when the Constitution clearly is anti-favoritism in terms of religion?
74 replies
Open
Birchford (167 D)
25 Jun 14 UTC
Parameter 'fromTerrID' set to invalid value '32'
Hello, has anyone encountered this error before, and if so do you have a fix for it? Thanks for your help.
13 replies
Open
dr. octagonapus (210 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Commenting on ongoing gunboat games
I realise of course that you are not allowed to circumvent the no talking rule, like press via email or pm or f2f talking etc. but why is discussing the board in general disallowed? I get that I should not say who I am in the game but if someone is to talk about the board unbiased and without revealing who they are would this be acceptable?
23 replies
Open
ssorenn (0 DX)
09 Jun 14 UTC
Two team members per country game?
Would anyone be interested in creating a game, that each of the 7 clasic countries were comprised of two team members consulting together. I understand that only one can actually be listed in the game itself, but maybe create a side pot for the second team members that would pay out equally at end of game
236 replies
Open
KingCyrus (511 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Boys State
Anyone familiar with this program?
5 replies
Open
Buzzle (1531 D)
23 Jun 14 UTC
multi-players
What if you have strong suspicions that someone is multi-playing in a game? Who do you contact to check into it?
38 replies
Open
fulhamish (4134 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
US constitution
I readily admit to starting from a low base on this one, but.....
Yellowjacket (835 D(B))
24 Jun 14 UTC
(+3)
InB4 dumbest premise imaginable
fulhamish (4134 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
On a recent visit to the States I was told that the constitution leans very heavily on that of the Iroquois Confederation. Indeed, several of the founding fathers acknowledged this. An example given was the four year hiatus before the appointment of Washington as the first President. True or not?
bo_sox48 (5202 DMod(G))
24 Jun 14 UTC
What?
Draugnar (0 DX)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Well, your time frame is *way* off.

From Wikipedia:

The United States presidential election of 1788–1789 was the 1st quadrennial presidential election. It was held from Monday, December 15, 1788 to Saturday, January 10, 1789. It was the first presidential election in the United States of America under the new United States Constitution, which was adopted on September 17, 1787

So just over a year between ratification and first election. Hell, Washington barely had time to get on TV and Radio in that time (kidding of course!, He had plenty of time! Also kidding! hehehe)
Jamiet99uk (1307 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#Influence_on_the_United_States
Draugnar (0 DX)
24 Jun 14 UTC
I have no doubt there was an influence, quite possibly a huge one, but there was not 4 years between the ratification of the Constitution and the election of Washington.
Putin33 (111 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
True.

We also copied the Iroquois habit of massacring anybody who got in our way.

fulhamish (4134 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Presidents of the Continental Congress, Draug?
ckroberts (3548 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Almost certainly not true, fulhamish, except to the extent to which it may have been part of an idea about confederation and representation in the metaphorical air. There are other, actually proven, sources for the U.S. Constitution. Who said that, or rather in what circumstance did you hear that argument?
Putin33 (111 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/28/us/iroquois-constitution-a-forerunner-to-colonists-democratic-principles.html

Also Bruce Johansen’s Forgotten Founders: How the American Indian Helped Shape Democracy,” Nancy Dieter Egloff’s, “Six Nations of Ignorant Savages: Benjamin Franklin and the Iroquois League of Nations,” and Kirke and Lynn Shelby Kickingbird’s “Indians and the United States Constitution: A Forgotten Legacy.”
fulhamish (4134 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
At ck I am afraid that I heard it from a tour guide whilst visiting the Navajo and Hopi reservation in Arizona near the Grand Canyon (work and pleasure). Possibly not the most objective view I know. Hence, my question here was a genuine one.

Incidentally I wonder if many Americans are aware of the grinding poverty on that particular reservation and, for all I know, elsewhere too. I can at least vouch for that.
Ogion (3817 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
It is true, actually. One of the many sources
ckroberts (3548 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
@Putin: It's a good thing that Americans take some steps to recognize how the government has historically and I guess contemporarily been so awful to Native Americans, but that's not a good way to do it. And I don't find a politically-motivated effort (that's the push that ended up being the congressional statement, I think) from 1987 terribly impressive.

I suppose we could play the historiography game, but I don't really want to. I will say that Jack Rakove, to my knowledge the top historian today on the making of the Constitution, is strongly against the Iroquois influence theory.

There was some doubtlessly considerable indirect influence in terms of promoting the notion of a confederation of different people, but even more so in terms of seeing Indians as a threat which demanded a stronger government. I haven't seen an argument yet which I find convincing to prove that the Iroquois Confederacy actually influenced, in any direct way, the creation of the Constitution. There are two main reasons:

a. the main thinker behind the Constitution was James Madison, aka "Father of the Constitution," who was (like most of the rest of the Convention) strongly influenced by his deep immersion in the European intellectual traditions of governance and by his experiences in practical politics. These are provable, stated influences which don't need any additional examples or inputs.

b. More generally: The Americans were busy killing or expelling Indians as fast as they could. Part of the background of the Revolution is the desire to free American settlers from English limitations on taking land from Indians in the Ohio Valley etc. Indians were not considered equal to whites or able to live in American society, even after various tribes take gigantic efforts to Americanize themselves (e.g. the Cherokee). Why would Americans take influence from a people who they clearly saw as inferior?

@fulhamish That makes sense, at least the origins of where you heard the tale, but I don't think there's much evidence for it.
fulhamish (4134 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Thank you for your views ck, I now appreciate that this premise is open to debate.

What further emerges from your post is that rather than the Revolutionary War, we might better describe those particular events as the first American Civil War? Interesting.
Putin33 (111 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
CK

I provided you three scholarly works on the subject. You can remain unconvinced without looking at that if you want, but don't claim that all I provided was a politically motivated 1987 NYT article.

"The Americans were busy killing or expelling Indians as fast as they could. Why would Americans take influence from a people who they clearly saw as inferior?"

Many of the Americans experienced intimate interaction with the political machinery of the Indian tribes when they fought in the service of the British during the French and Indian wars. They actively sought alliances and signed treaties with the Indians.

"the main thinker behind the Constitution was James Madison, aka "Father of the Constitution," who was (like most of the rest of the Convention) strongly influenced by his deep immersion in the European intellectual traditions of governance"

None of the "European intellectual traditions" of governance had any experience with republican confederal self-government up until that point. Their experience with government was parliamentary monarchy in a unitary state. So some new inputs are in fact needed.
ckroberts (3548 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Fulham, absolutely, especially in the regions farther away from the coasts/major rivers and depending on how broadly you want to define "American". To trim down a very complicated story, it's unlikely that a majority of the American citizenry actively supported independence prior to it being a mostly established fact near the end of the war. But at the same time, relatively few people (especially among white citizens) were particularly happy with the relationship with England. Various Native Americans, though, definitely and actively opposed colonial independence, as they recognized that the English were the only things keeping the Americans from kicking the Indians out entirely.
Putin33 (111 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Ironically many of the people who were most opposed to colonial administration prior to the war fought for the loyalist side during it (regulators). I don't know if people were upset with relationship with England so much as the governors they had put in place in the 60s and 70s. The metropole and colonial administrators often did not agree on matters of governance, as the whole history of British India can attest.
ckroberts (3548 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Putin you have encouraged me to skip doing actual work and for that I thank you.

In re: American opposition to the Revolution, something I think we underestimate is the significance of people leaving. It deeply influenced both the course of the war in the soon-to-be USA and the governance of places like Canada after the war.

Anyway. Here is an article from WMQ which responds to these kinds of citations (all of which appear to be pretty old, which explains why this article is from 1996): http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rrath/hist460/IroqInf-Payne.pdf
The conclusion in part: "The Iroquois had no significant influence on the drafting or ratification of the Constitution or the Articles of Confederation. In all probability, the framers and the members of the Continental Congress would have written those documents the way they did even if they had not known of the Iroquois League."

Here is a link from an article by Jack Rakove: http://hnn.us/article/12974
His response to your final paragraph "All the key political concepts that were the stuff of American political discourse before the Revolution and after, had obvious European antecedents and referents [...]" I would add that the Federalist is in large part an explanation that tells us how the authors of the Constitution applied old ideas to the new context of the American republic.

The only Revolutionary era survey I have, Cogliano's Revolutionary America, only mentions Iroquios in the context of fighting the war. It's a survey so it's not as deep in the weeds of such debates, but it certainly emphasizes the experience of governance and the European tradition, with nothing about Native influences that I can see.

Pleasantly, Forgotten Founders is actually available online: http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FF.html
My brief glance through suggests it's taking too far the movement of the 1970s/80s to (rightfully) restore the importance/sophistication/etc etc of indigenous Americans who had been woefully underserved in American scholarship.
ckroberts (3548 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
I will also add that back when I thought I was going to do Revolutionary era-politics, instead of the Modern South where I ended up, I tried to do an analysis of Federalist and Antifederalist pseudonyms along the lines of Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. The names I found largely came from European sources. I am tempted to post the whole thing here to punish us all.
Draugnar (0 DX)
24 Jun 14 UTC
"Presidents of the Continental Congress, Draug?"

That wasn't Washington.

"An example given was the four year hiatus before the appointment of Washington as the first President."

He was the first POTUS, not the first POTCC. The first POTCC was Randolph and that was *before* the Constitution was written.
Tru Ninja (1016 D(S))
24 Jun 14 UTC
I had no idea what any of this is about but after reading several posts? I became interested and did some research of my own. I found something that may be of interest:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_penis_rule
ckroberts (3548 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
more like Tru Philistine.
Tru Ninja (1016 D(S))
24 Jun 14 UTC
Lol HEY WAIT! THAT GUY IS ME!


23 replies
SYnapse (0 DX)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Jihadists in Syria
Right now David Cameron is going on about the "threat" from Jihadists leaving the UK to go fight in Iraq and Syria.
Am I missing something? Why are Jihadists fighting in Syria a threat here? To me, it seems no more different than Orwell fighting in Spain.
28 replies
Open
obiwanobiwan (248 D)
24 Jun 14 UTC
Putin on Putin: An Open Invitation to Putin33 on the Russia/Ukraine/Syria Crisis
Welcome BACK, Putin33...my oh my, how the world of international politics has exploded since you last graced us with your presence...are you ready to decry your namesake for the scourge of the world that he is? Most assuredly not, but let this be an open letter and open invitation for you to give YOUR take on the whole of the crisis--and your namesake in particular--as so many have been wondering if you'd capitulate to common sense and call him out for the thug Big Bad Vlad is.
26 replies
Open
Jamiet99uk (1307 D)
23 Jun 14 UTC
(+3)
Can atheists believe in free willy?
If our consciousness is simply a product of the mushy 3-dimensional circuit board we call a brain, governed entirely by the fixed and unchanging laws of physics and chemistry, is it possible to believe that a disaffected but endearing youth could inspire a captive orca whale to jump out of the water and over a 15 foot high sea wall?
7 replies
Open
curupira (3441 D)
23 Jun 14 UTC
Classic variant: less than seven players.
I have recent engaged at this online Diplomacy. Long time ago, I did played this game in board. There were choices in the Classic Map for less than seven players. For six players, for example, one have to quit Turkey and Bulgaria. Is there any variants at this webDiplomacy that allow games of this kind? Could it be created?
2 replies
Open
Chaqa (3971 D(B))
23 Jun 14 UTC
Pair of press games
gameID=143769
gameID=143770

If anyone's intereste.
3 replies
Open
steephie22 (182 D(S))
17 Jun 14 UTC
Need some web design in the holidays?
Planning ahead, I'll probably be happy doing anything more useful than what most people usually do during holidays, so I figured that doing some web design for someone is a good way to help, brush up and improve my skills and perhaps even earn a couple of bucks. Perhaps someone has such a project for me?
See inside.
26 replies
Open
oscarjd74 (100 D)
27 Feb 14 UTC
(+2)
Backseat Driver Diplomacy thread
gameID=136645

DO NOT POST IN HERE UNLESS YOU ARE ONE OF THE BACKSEAT DRIVERS IN THE BACKSEAT DRIVER GAME.
390 replies
Open
CommanderByron (801 D(S))
22 Jun 14 UTC
Variant?
New variant idea with alot of changes to Classic. would add to the naval combat substantially and would intentionally reduce ground forces at the start of the game changing possibly the direction the countries attacked at turn 0
17 replies
Open
CommanderByron (801 D(S))
22 Jun 14 UTC
(+1)
Challenge
I am looking for experienced players to play against so I can learn more and better myself? I realize i am relatively new but I think I have a valid argument for why I should be given the chance. Looking for a classic, PPSC, ANON no messaging game.
17 replies
Open
trip (696 D(B))
19 Jun 14 UTC
Lusthog Gunboat
Lusthog = no voting to draw until a stalemate line has been established and held.
Anyone interested in a game or two?
37 replies
Open
the southern lord (0 DX)
22 Jun 14 UTC
Strange orders
Hi,

Has anyone else noticed that the orders you've put in the past week, are often not what happens?
16 replies
Open
Page 1173 of 1419
FirstPreviousNextLast
Back to top