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[–] 75 points 1 year ago (29 children)

Not many countries had to arm the person next to the coach driver to fight off natives defending their country against foreign invaders.

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  • [+] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    No, no, no, this is all wrong. When we discuss immigration and the current situation in the US all Americans are European immigrants.

    When we talk about the genocide of the natives Americans, it was done by Americans, Europeans had nothing to do with it.

    ;-)

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm the times coaches like that became common it wasn't really safe to travel in most parts of the world.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Weren't these coaches a thing in the 19th century US, from which time the term comes? From what i could find quickly, Highway robbery became less of a thing in the UK and mainland Europe by the end of the 18th century.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (18 children)

    No, but many needed to protect those passengers from bandits and other assorted outlaws.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    Fun fact: Joseph Stalin first became known to Lenin when he organized the successful robbery of a bank stagecoach in Russia. The stagecoaches were heavily protected by armed men riding on the outside of the coach as well as riding horses alongside, but Stalin observed that they tended to relax their guard upon reaching a densely-populated city, on the assumption that revolutionaries would not be willing to injure or kill innocent bystanders.

    This assumption was very wrong in Stalin's case. He had his people lob satchel bombs at the coach and riders after they reached the city, killing most of the guards as well as nearly 100 innocent bystanders in the vicinity. They made off with a huge amount of money, and Lenin congratulated Stalin although he had only planned the operation and not participated in it. The importance of delegation!

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (14 children)

    Huh, who knew that violent bank robbers who indiscriminately kill bystanders would do a bunch of genocide after their violent takeover complete with secret police and gulags I mean create the best goverbmont in history, praise USSR or something.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    Look, stalin did a lot of things wrong, but robbing banks is pretty cool even with collateral damage.

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  • [+] -1 points 1 year ago* (12 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (11 children)

    money where your mouth is

    I'm actually unbanked!

    innocent

    Totally. Killing innocent people isnt morally sound.

    at a bank

    So you mean coerced into complicity?

    absolutely morally uncomplicated and good to simple binary morality

    That is what cool means, yes. Learn to cope with complexity before getting pissy. If you're going to get precious about innocent dead, maybe talk more about cops and oligarchs.

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago (10 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

    Ive been attacked by fascists and cops on multiple occasions. I've been running for my life nonstop for twenty years. I have scars on just about every substantial portion of my body from things you dont consider violent, and scars on my empty heart from dead or irreparably ruined friends, ripped from me by institutions you consider innocent.

    I live in a world of profound violence. I step out my front door each time knowing i could be killed, for any reason or none at all, by the protectors of your banks and their property. I go to sleep each night knowing i could be woken by a battering ram, and be dragged off to decades of torture if they don't kill me on the spot. I dream of friends lost to police dogs i only escaped by chance, dying of infected wounds in the literal shadow of a modern hospital in one of the wealthiest regions to have ever existed, because the bank says they don't deserve care and the triage nurse is sick of seeing them and the easy to get antibiotics were exhausted in animal agriculture to make your line-go-up probably before i was born

    Violence against those systems is cool. It makes me happy. Collateral damage against those complicit isn't something i have strong opinions on, but if you don't see me as human, why should i waste my heart on compassion for your bourgoise ass? I dream of a couple months of red terror against your centuries of white. I think that's cool, even in circumstances where it fails to be too terribly good, like 1917.

    You wanting me dead is nothing new. Your kind has wanted me dead since my parents threw me out, since i was a literal child. Your outrage only tells me you're afraid now. That you know your abbotoir is on fire, and you sold all the fire suppression systems to buy more cops. There will casualties and 'innocents' and even inmocents¹ who die in that fire. I will cherish the beauty and warmth of it all the same, and only wish that I had been the one to set it.

    ¹i remember being one of those! If you gave a shit, you were cheering on everything that damned me. As you are now. Why on earth does someone like you suddenly give a shit what i think? Why on earth do you think someone like you, representing a class and a world that threw me away like fucking trash, are entitled to it?

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago* (8 children)
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    The fact you're whining so much but totally disregarding even the possibility of police violence suggests you're just upset that someonw got money they weren't supposed to have.

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago (6 children)
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    Why the fuck do you think you and people like you are entitled to my compassion, when you so freely wish death upon me?

    I really should care if you die, i should be happy about it. By your own admission repeated assertion it would make me safer.

    I don't, again, give a fuck either way-but you're arguing very aggressively that I should. Then scolding me for not having an opinion either way?

    Also, not to be a pedant, but I never had a mom, my stepdads wife decided i was too queer and an NGMI as a child, and I grew up and cureently live in california; basements are only a thing in very very recent construction here.

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  • [+] 0 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    i just said i hope you fucking die you piece of shit, and came up with excuses to not care abouy anything you said. You know, to teach you empathy.

    Truly a fucking master of pedagogy. What is this technique called? Has anyone else ever failed to learn from you, or am i the first?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    There was once a theory that the reason for the difference in which side a vehicle is driving on the road today, stems from whether a country had many stretches of untamed wilderness with lots of bandits. So if there was a high likelihood that whoever you met on the road was a danger, the horsecart driver preferred passing them on the side of their sword arm (right hand as default), while if you did not have to take that into account, you would pass them on the left hand side.

    The theory has now largely been abandonded as spurious, but it does remain a fact that there were dangerous stretches of roads in older times in Europe as well.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That's not what it was for. They fired a shotgun before turning onto a road. If two wagons came head to head on a crappy old western road it could cause hours of delay because the horses would have to be hitched to the back of one of the wagons a pull it all the way back to the crossroad.

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