The Nonsense thread

[Lew Blum]

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[Brickos]

[MedicineCabinet]

 

[MedicineCabinet]

[Deine Mudder]

[Deine Mudder]

[Mellow]

dyin'

[Boodah]

Bisexual men and Christian women. Nonsense.

[Caps.Off.For.Ya.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktmdgC7pZxg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktmdgC7pZxg

[Shittles..TasteTheAsshole]

[Decyferon]

 

 

 

 

 

[YearzOne]

A for effort, C for CHEESEBURGERS

 

[bobbydigital]

[Toiletseat]

[MedicineCabinet]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Pet]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

no punchline

[Decyferon]

[MOOGLE?]

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[Boodah]

 

 

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Hoia Baciu Forest is known as the Bermuda Triangle of Romania. The forest is complete with legends of missing people, electronic devices that spontaneously stop working, and UFO sightings.

 

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Mütter Museum, Pennsylvania

The Mütter Museum is just plain creepy. It houses a collection of body parts, fetuses, and — worst of all — wax statues.

 

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Oradour-sur-Glane, France

Oradour-sur-Glane was a small French village that the Nazi SS made an example of. The entire city was burned, and almost every inhabitant was executed.

 

Jacob’s Well, Texas

Jacob’s Well is a natural spring over 100 feet deep. Multiple novice swimmers have died exploring its depths. Water zombies? Terrifying.

 

Maunsell Sea Forts, North Sea

The Maunsell Sea Forts were designed to protect England from a possible Nazi invasion during WWII. Today they are mostly uninhabited, except for by recluses, smugglers, and the Principality of Sealand.

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Varosha, Cyprus

Varosha is a completely uninhabited resort city on Cyprus’ coast. After the Turkish invasion, Varosha was quickly evacuated. Today, Varosha stands frozen displaying exactly how life was in 1974.

 

 

 

 

Leap Castle, Ireland

Reportedly one of the most haunted castles in the world, Leap Castle’s hallways are patrolled by the Elemental — an unexplainable force. Also, Leap Castle was the site of historic slaughter, and it was also built on top of a torture pit.

 

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Jatinga, India

Nothing is particularly horrifying about Jatinga…except for the en masse bird suicides that happen every September to October. The really strange part? They only occur from 7–10 p.m.

 

 

San Zhi Resort, Taiwan

Once upon a time, San Zhi was built to be a peaceful resort area outside of Taipei, Taiwan. Mysteriously, construction was suddenly abandoned after a series of deaths, leaving the mostly finished “pod resort” to decay.

 

The Catacombs, Paris

The Parisian Catacombs function as a gigantic ossuary and cemetery for approximately 6 million bodies. Beyond just bones, there is also the non-tourist section of the Catacombs, where a mostly illegal and unpoliced second city extends for miles beneath Paris.

 

 

 

Wonderland, China

Wonderland was going to be China’s answer to Disneyland, but multiple times larger. Construction problems led to the project being totally scrapped. The crumbling remains are completely open to any would-be adventurer or warlord, though.

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Akodessewa Fetish Market, Togo

Since over half of the population of Togo continues to practice indigenous beliefs, fetish markets command huge sails. Just imagine: shrunken heads and skulls as far as the eye can see.

 

Cincinnati’s Subway System, Ohio

Cincinnati attempted to build a subway system in the early 1900s, only to run out of funding. The empty tunnels still run along beneath the city, half finished and fully creepy.

 

Kryziu Kalnas, The Hill of Crosses, Lithuania

Originally Kryziu Kalnas was a ceremonial site where Lithuanians would mourn the dead lost at war. The Soviet Union twice bulldozed this area, only for locals to build it bigger. Today, over 100,000 crosses stand on the hill.

 

Kabayan Mummy Caves, The Philippines

The Kabayan Mummy Burial Caves are exactly as they sound. They’re just manmade caves full of some of the most well-preserved mummies in the world, isolated from the rest of the world in remote mountains.

 

Muynak, Uzbekistan

Muynak was once a busy port city on the Aral Sea. That was, until the Soviets (not again!) unintentionally drained the sea for irrigation. Today, rusted-out boats litter the now-desert floor.

 

Centralia, Pennsylvania

Centralia was once a bustling mining town, until the coal veins under the city caught on fire. This fire has been burning continuously right beneath Centralia since 1962. Today the entire city lies abandoned

 

Island of the Dolls, Mexico

The Island of The Dolls is an uninhabited island in Xochimilco, Mexico. According to legend, a girl died in the canals surrounding the island, after which dolls began to wash ashore constantly. The island’s sole inhabitant took to hanging the dolls around the island as a vigil for the deceased girl.

 

The Door to Hell, Turkmenistan

The Door to Hell was originally a gas field set alight by Soviet scientists that has been burning continuously for over 40 years. Inexplicably, spiders seem to love this place and swarm there by the thousands.

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There's a lack of appreciation in this and other comments, I think, for why WWI was so traumatic for soldiers.

There's an ebb and flow over military history between the offense and the defense having the upper hand. In the last major European war before WWI, the Franco-Prussian War, the offense had the edge; Germany won via its decisive and swift march onto Paris, disabling France before it could really even get in the fight. Decades later, however, by the time WWI began, technology had changed; advances in artillery, machine gun, railway systems, fortifications, etc., and even the adaptation of some low-tech stuff like barbed wire, made the defense much more powerful than the offensive technology that existed at the time.

But the mindset that everyone was operating under was still based on that last major war. This was the rationale behind Germany's invasion of France through Belgium- it believed it had to move quickly to disable France, or it would lose a two-sided war against France and Russia. Likewise, the cult of the offensive dominated French thinking; there was a strikingly testosterone-driven belief that a fervent charge of bayonets was enough to overcome any machine gun fire. And let's not even get started on cavalry. This was the first war in history where cavalry was finally and completely rendered obsolete, and the generals did not adapt well, they were still sending cavalry out to be massacred by machine gun fire even by the time the war ended.

The point is, you have this dynamic where the technology of the time says, "Sit and defend," and the generals say, "Go out and charge!" And the shocking thing is how long it takes the military leadership, especially of the Entente, to adapt; and how frequently they relapse. Really why the war dragged as long as it did; the Germans were better, although by no means perfect, at learning not to bleed themselves dry (culminating ultimately in the intentionally flexible Hindenburg line, while the French were still ordering their men to never yield an inch of ground.) So there's this cycle of long squalid tedium, guys sitting in mud holes getting eaten alive by bugs and fungi and their own bodies, eaten cold food out of tins, interrupted by the occasional pointless but massive bloodletting as whoever's in charge this month initiates another stupid offensive that he sells back home as being decisive and sure to break the stalemate, but maybe, at best, gains a few square miles of territory- as often as not lost again six months later.

And meanwhile the artillery. WWI has lots of poison gas, although it's not very effective in the final tally, and snipers and machine guns, and sappers that explode a line from underneath you; but all together none of them take near the toll that the artillery does. WWI was the war for artillery, dominated by the big guns, with tanks and functioning bombers still in the future. The industrial countries blow through millions of tons of artillery shells, cratering and re-cratering the landscape, first indiscriminately and then in creeping waves as they learn how to use them; the entire peace-time reservoirs of shells are expended in months at the start of the war, and they churn out more, the later battles often using in a matter of days as many shells as even existed in the world in 1912. Being on the frontlines usually meant being surrounded by the constant shock and roar of the big guns, always meant living in fear that you could be snuffed out in an instant by them; and besides the pure psychological terror, meant exposure to literal shockwaves that were constantly fucking with your brain in ways we're just coming to grips with today as we deal with combat veterans who've been exposed to IEDs.

So to recap; if you're a soldier in WWI, you're spending your time in a squalid trench- German trenches were constructed better but made up for it with the severe shortages of pretty much everything caused by the British naval blockade, so that almost everything you ate or wore was a poor substitute made from something else; paper shoes and acorn coffee. Most of the time is a constant tedium undergirded by the fear that at any second a massive offensive could be launched, or even just a random burst of artillery fire, that reduces you to powder without your ever hearing or seeing a warning of it. This is the best case scenario. Worst case scenario you're in an offensive and your general is sending you out to get ground up against the enemy's defenses, with deserters getting shot or hung, trying to crawl through shell-blasted mud and barbed wire into a nest of machine gunners. Slightly luckier and you're on the defense, which is great as long as you don't get gassed or an artillery shell doesn't land on you, or sappers don't blow up the entire ridge you're sitting on, or snipers don't see your head sticking up, or just caught at the hammer point of an all-out offensive that might peter out a few miles forward but is going to sweep you aside through sheer mass of numbers.

And this just goes on. And on. That's what drives people mad. All this thunder and blood and mud and nothing changes. Some of the battles themselves drag on for months of near-constant murder. Maybe if you have a good general you get rotated through so you're not constantly living under the guillotine, but more likely your commander has you or a bunch of your buddies killed for a few worthless square miles you have to give up again when he realizes he can't defend them effectively.

The "Stabbed in the Back" myth that Hitler would use later to help rise to power held that the German army was never defeated in the field, that it lost to politicians at home. The first part is actually kind of true though. Even on the run at the end, the Germans inflicted about as many casualties as they took. The thing is they were never really victorious in the field, because battles during WWI just weren't winnable, really. To either side. The technology meant that both sides were just slowly, painfully bleeding each other until someone gave up. To the soldiers this meant there was no hope of victory- but also no hope even of defeat. Just sitting there, waiting to die.

And all war is barbaric, but it's not hard to see why WWI was so unusually tormenting to the mental well-being of those who fought it.

edit: Sweet, tasty karma. I am studying to become a history teacher, actually. Also if you found the above interesting you want to read A World Undone by GJ Meyer, definitely the best comprehensive and introductory resource on WWI I'm aware of. Goes into all of the above with much more awesome detail, also delves into the incredibly interesting and frustrating story of the series of fuckups that led to war breaking out in the first place, which was hardly the unavoidable outcome you probably read in your gradeschool textbook.