So wrong, yet perfectly accurate!

[kpete]

https://twitter.com/mikesldy6969/status/683798368783568896/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[JackInGreen]

1. I can almost hear bobby bad-ass on the left screaming

'WOLVERINES!' in his mind.

[tazkcmo]

2. Love the gun safety.

Douche Bag in the white pointing it at Douche Bag kneeling. Nice.

[dixiegrrrrl]

12. Such "a well regulated militia" indeed. n/t

[Bucky]

3. I wonder what the Roman Numeral 3 means in the middle of 13 stars

I suspect they're calling this the 3rd American Revolution (with 1861 being the 2nd)

[gratuitous]

4. "Three Percenters"

I'm not sure the exact meaning, but I think it refers to the alleged percentage of the population who actually took up arms and fought in the American Revolution. Part of their delusion is that they're the ideological and revolutionary heirs to the founding fathers.

[uriel1972]

5. Maybe not the 'Founding Fathers'...

As it happens they were mostly educated ^_^ and Deism was a popular choice in their ranks.

The rank and file not so educated and traditionally religious.

[Bucky]

6. It's a different conversation, but there's a lot of debate on just how "religious" the populace was

Deism was popular among a few intellectuals, but the majority of the Founding Fathers were pretty sincere Anglicans. They were not evangelicals by today's standards, of course, but not exactly Free Thinkers, either.

As for the "rank and file" - church attendance was pretty low in the 1770s and 1780s compared to, say, what was going on in the 1800s. The country became significantly more church-oriented religious in the generations after the Revolution.

[gratuitous]

7. It's also instructive to remember

That the religious movement we now know as evangelical wasn't really put in motion until the mid-1800s and the fundamentalist movement wasn't begun for another 50 years after that. 18th Century religious belief and practice was unfamiliar with these relatively recent "innovations."

[uriel1972]

9. Which is why I put 'Traditionally' in there..

The 'Awakenings' and 'Fundamentalism' which followed them weren't really on the horizon back then.
I think what I was trying to say, was there was a real difference between the upper crust and the rank and file.

The Bundistan Liberation Army is far from the being the heirs of the Founding Fathers. The FF's were conservative in a very real sense, the BLA is an extremely radical authoritarion rabble.

[Bucky]

10. Hmmm, interesting. Of course the "3%" figure is pretty misleading.

There may have never been more than 3% of the population in the field at any given time (and at sometimes significantly less). But damn few veterans (except for the officers) stayed in uniforms throughout the war. Men would enlist and then go home to farm when their contracts ran out. Duration of the war enlistments were pretty rare among the literal "rank and file" bluecoats. I suspect something closer to 20-30% of the male population at some point took up arms, depending on how close to their homes the fighting took place.

Besides, 3% of 3 million colonists is still a pretty impressive turn-out (90,000 men removed from a society that was barely above subsistence farming in food production), even if there was rotation among who was counted among those 90,000 men). I don't think any war saw that high a level of enlistment until World War 2, when the entire nation was mobilized.

FWIW, it's probably also worth considering that any military force was also followed by a civilian contingent of 20-50% size consisting of wives, washer-women, purchasing agents, horse wranglers, prostitutes, and non-fighting servants. An army of 10,000 troops would be followed by a sizeable complement of several thousand followers.

In other words, "3%" is bullshit

[uriel1972]

11. Like any mythology, it doesn't bear much scrutiny...

On a side not the Spartan '300' were aided by several thousand slave troops at Thermopyle. I'm not aware of anyone writing a comic book about them yet < ^_^ >

[underpants]

8. Dumb dumb dumb d'uh da dumb dumb

[awoke_in_2003]

13. Off to the greatest

I just saw some one use the term Vanilla ISIS in another thread. I was wondering where it came from.