Episode 365 - The War of the Oaken Bucket

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

It is I, Joe, and with me is Tom and Nate.

We've unfortunately become Italian.

We're sneaking through the countryside of Bologna, circa the 1300s, wearing our finest Italian combat uniforms: pure white denim, leather loafers without socks, and a mesh white v-neck shirt, so plunging our dick and balls are hanging out the top.

As we sneak up on the enemy positions, we stub out our cigarettes perched ever so delicately at the end of our cigarette holders.

We unsheathe our traditional Italian weapon, a single spaghetti noodle, sharpened to a fine edge.

As we fall upon our enemy, we let out our battle cry:

How you doing, guys?

I'm doing very good.

I was thinking about traditional Italian weapons, and it's like every fiat made between the years 1945 and 1975 is basically an SV bid

fine.

Italian engineering.

Just a really, really long pork cutlet knight used as a HAL word.

I mean, I don't actually know that many Italian stereotypes, but I am going to have to go to Italy.

So I'm I'm going to have a lot of Italian experience shortly, and I'm excited because I've only been there once when I was seven for a day because my dad wanted to save money by flying space available on military aircraft, and it costs us to get routed to every shitty military airport in Europe instead of where we wanted to go.

I think I've pointed this out before on the shows: every Italian stereotype that I bring up is specifically about Italian Americans.

It has nothing to do with Italians that live in Italy.

Wow, of course, yeah.

And many Italians who actually listen to the show are like, those are just Italian Americans.

Like, look, I know, but they're funny.

They're so funny.

But every Italian from Italy that I've met has made me think that the stereotypes aren't mean enough.

I've had people tell me that

I should heat up olive oil and rub it all over my baby so that she can like breathe better.

I've had people tell me that it's actually bad for my baby's health if she eats mangoes because they're not fruit that can be cultivated in Europe.

And like it's really important that it be based in local agriculture.

I've had Italians tell me that Chinese tourists are bringing viruses to Europe because they're digging up ancient tombs with secret viruses in them and shit.

Like

a horrid tomb, yeah.

Yes.

The fucking Chinese covert archaeologists are trying to make COVID too.

I love the idea of like, we've uncovered a ghost virus.

Brother, I'm telling you, like, and that's all from like not Italian Americans, not like, you know, Guido DiFuccoli from Staten Island.

This is like people from Italy with Italian passports who grew up in Italy.

But only Italians would be like, oh, you know, that 2020 COVID-19 pandemic originated in Italy.

I mean, I went to a really great Italian restaurant with an Italian friend of mine whose parents are immigrants to Italy.

And she was like, this is randomly the best Italian restaurant I've been to like in a really long time in the middle of Switzerland.

And we bought wine and it's the guy running it, she knew him.

They'd become friends.

And he brought out this bottle of wine.

It was called like Quid, like Q U I D, like like in Latin, but it spelled like the Roman style, like Q U V I D.

And he's like,

it's a not the Chinese a COVID.

It's an Italian a COVID.

I was just like, fucking,

I was just like, oh my God, every stereotype is real.

Well, thankfully, because today's episode is going to bring us to Italy.

We've been doing the show a long time.

And when I ask you the question, what's a really stupid reason to go to war?

It could very easily be answered by failing a civil service exam.

And by no means am I saying that that answer is incorrect.

But what if I told you that once upon a time, two Italian city-states went to war over a bucket?

I would not be shocked at all.

Not in the slightest, no, not in the slightest.

Joe, I have seen two Italians that I knew in Ireland sustain a beef for six years and forget what it was about at about the three-year point and still go on for another three years.

Yeah, you have no choice but to double down.

It's like, you know, all the places that have like blood feuds.

It's like, you don't even remember what the original argument was about at this point.

That the hate is self-perpetuating.

Everything comes back to the Balkans.

I do have to point out from the top here, before people get mad at me, there's more to this battle, this war, than a bucket.

And in fact, the bucket is not important.

But we'll talk about that when we get to the end.

But before we get to the towns of Modena and Bologna punching each other full of speed holes over the world's finest spaghetti bucket, there's a lot of history at play here, specifically when it comes to the Holy Roman Empire and and the Catholic Church.

This kind of goes without saying, but until 1871, Italy was not really Italy.

It was not unified.

Cities, regions, kingdoms, the pope, empires, duchies, all that shit existed simultaneously, all within the saucy boot of Italy.

They're all constantly at each other's throats.

Some of them spoke dialects of Italian.

that were so different from the others, they'd hardly be considered the same language.

They had their own cultures.

There's nothing unifying going on here other than the Catholic Church and, of course, doing that thing with their hand, I assume.

You got to recognize that like Italy's terrain is like so vastly different depending on where you are in the country.

And like the further north you are, the closer they are to like what you would consider like Germanic and culture, whereas like the further south you go, it's like, oh no, these are mountain people.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's, it's, it's a large very diverse region uh all of them doing that thing with their hand i don't know what you call it the a

all the medieval stanley touchies just being like it's on my mom's meatballs

but because this story takes us back to the 1300s and in reality even before that everyone that we're talking about even though they're all technically believers and members of the same church, doesn't mean anything.

The war of the bucket, or sometimes known as the war of the oaken bucket, really has its roots about 200 years before the war starts.

The cause of which probably doesn't surprise you, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor having beef.

At the time, Pope Gregory VII and King turned Emperor Henry IV sparked something of a large-scale argument over what amounted to be, to make a very long story short here, yield separation of church and state.

And by that, I mean the separation over church matters.

This was called the investiture controversy, and it was when the pope and the emperor argued over who'd get to appoint official clergy from the lowest bishops to the position of pope itself.

The Holy Roman Emperor argued that they should be able to appoint everybody.

And of course, the Catholic Church disagreed with that.

It itself has roots in what's known as the imperial church system, or the system of which European nobility would give a ton of hypothetically secular governing power to clergymen of the church rather than other nobles or laypeople.

The reason for this is very, very simple.

Clergymen were supposed to be celibate, meaning they wouldn't have children, meaning there would be no competing heirs born from these clergymen in these high governing positions to challenge a ruling family of a given place.

If a place is ruled over by a celibate clergyman and then they die, a new one would just be selected by the local king and it would be a guy he likes and there would be no kind of competing dynasty.

It's kind of a great system.

I could just see Rodrigo Borgia rubbing his hands like the Birdman meme.

I mean, obviously,

you can see how the system really only works if that specific ruler is also allowed to select who the clergymen were.

Yeah.

Because once they have that position, which of course they would sell to people who would be loyal to them, they want people that's loyal to them as the ruler rather than people who are loyal to the church or the pope or any Christian faith at all.

It's a process that they ironically defended as their divine right.

I mean, look, there's a lot of things that wind up being divine rights that in retrospect, you're like, it kind of sounds like you guys have a direct line to God for specifically exactly the things that you want.

They're going to let you do exactly what you want.

It's sort of like granting a four-year-old a direct line to God as regards whether or not he can eat dessert first.

It says divine right of children to shit in their pants.

Yeah.

Look, they'd do that even if there was an injunction against it, right?

I'm sorry.

I'm excommunicating this baby.

It is not covered in warm olive oil.

Exactly.

It's like ablutions, basically.

Italian ablutions.

You saute them in olive oil a little bit to like, you know, get them back in God's good grace after they've shit themselves.

Yeah, everybody knows like a good way to raise your children is give them that good panseer.

yeah but people didn't realize that one of martin luther's theses was thou must not shit their thy pans yeah i mean wasn't he like didn't he do combat with demons in his mind and throw his shit around the room like i think that he probably would have left that one yeah i don't know who's to say who's to say he didn't win that is true that is true yeah i do like the idea that in in the in the 16th century they uh they didn't have tumbler so you just had to do whatever the fuck he did

you couldn't do the tactical pocket sand so you just had the tactical pants shit sometimes you end up getting in a Protestant coupite with demons in your mind.

There's nothing you can do when that happens.

I'm fighting demons in the mind, dojo.

Put in a Protestant way.

I mean, that's basically the plot of the Matrix.

Pretty much.

Now, like, the Emperor also argued that, well, if I'm picking all these bishops and cardinals and whatever, I should also get to pick the Pope.

After all, I am the Holy Roman Emperor.

Now, eventually, of course, this does happen with the Emperor picking a Pope who, effectively, paid him the most money to be pope.

This led to a blow-up as segments of the Catholic clergy fought back against this practice, not because of any religious objection to it, not because if you're a true believer, of course, of this faith, this is just all heresy all the way down, but rather because some other asshole is getting to benefit from the church's corruption and not them.

So, this goes on for decades, and eventually, the admittedly awesomely named Concordant of Worms is signed between the Pope and the Emperor in 1122.

So named because it was signed in the lovely town of

Worms, Germany, which I know is pronounced like Volms.

Volms, yes, Volms, yeah.

But that is way less fun.

There is, I think, another town called Worms of America, but it's not this one.

It's just, it's Worms in English, but it's Volms in German, yeah.

The Concordant of Worms sounds like a metal band that would have their name written in a font that you absolutely cannot read.

Oh, no, I mean, yeah, yeah,

This sounds like a band where you're going to get hearing loss by seeing them live.

Yes.

How many Doom Metal bands have I been like, this is so cool for 10 minutes?

Then at minute 11, I'm like, I am leaving and I'm going really far away.

I'm going to live in a cave for a year or I will never hear a sound again.

It's one of those metal bands that like weirdly only tours in the Baltics because they know they can not have to wear long sleeve shirts to cover up certain tattoos there.

They are absolutely under no circumstances allowed to perform in Germany.

Yes, specifically the town of Ferbs.

The concordant largely put the power of selection back in the hands of the Pope, but with the emperor allowed to play some role in the process.

Then Henry died three years later.

Henry's from what is known as the Salaan dynasty,

and so is virtually every other German king and Holy Roman Emperor, going back several generations.

However, the next man in line for the Salaan dynasty was hit with a one-two punch of being an absolutely massive asshole to the point that its traditional allies really didn't want to back him in the vote to become emperor and king and losing at weird backdoor imperial politics of the day to the Supplinberg family, the main political opponent of the Salaians.

With that, Lothar III of the Supplinburgs was selected as king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor.

What a fucking name.

Yeah, Jesus Christ, yeah.

That is a guy who runs a private bank headquartered in Liechtenstein.

Lothar Supplinberg.

Or Luxembourg, for that matter.

Or Monaco's a solid bet.

True.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, there's so many of these.

You forget about these little European microstates all the time.

You know, it's like, but I'm just, that is a great name, man.

That is, that is, like, I feel as though that guy has to do something fucked up and perverted because he was denied his divine right.

and true mission of carrying as Weihender everywhere he went.

Like, he was supposed to be a Landis Connect, and because he can't, he has to be like a banker who,

let's not talk about what he's got.

Let's not talk about the kind of nudes he's sending.

He probably has like a dueling scar that he gave himself in the mirror with a wildly overpriced straight razor.

So, what you're basically saying is that this guy, if you give him combat and chivalry and knightly orders, he can become this person.

And if you don't, he becomes Jeremy Fragrance.

Now, this immediately leads to conflict between between him and the Hohenstaufen house, who were the slain loyalists.

And it was their idiot kid who was next in line for the throne.

This leads to a war.

This war spirals wildly out of control between the two sides until eventually the Hohenstaufens elected an anti-king, Conrad III, who had a fair amount of support in Italy.

And to make a very long story short, which I know I'm bad at, Lothar fears losing.

and runs to the Pope for support and then gives up all of the rights that the Holy Roman Emperor was given in the Concordon of Worms, meaning that now we have like a pro-Catholic church supremacy side of the Holy Roman Empire and then an anti with the Hohenstaufens wanting to take full rights back from the church and Lothar giving them to the Pope to secure his throne.

The schism blows up throughout Europe in different regions, houses, and cities, and this includes northern Italy, where the, for the lack of a better term, because they're both on the side of the Catholic Church, but one is more pro-church to the other.

I'm just going to call one papist and the other one imperial.

Nate, I can't get over the idea of like if Jeremy Fragrance had been around at this time, he would have ended up as Pope.

Yeah, like this fragrance pope.

You're basically doing like Cloud Atlas shit, but for Jeremy Fragrance throughout all of European history, there has, he's like the Highlander.

There's always a Jeremy Fragrance has existed once

so much.

The number one fragrance influencer who follows the teachings of Christ.

The fragrance that's going to meet all of his criteria, you know, and achieve like superlative scores is the secret perfume they put on you when they make you pope.

And so, like, in order to achieve that, he's been having to reinvent, you know, reincarnate throughout all of European history trying to get there.

I don't know what the oil they put on you when you become pope is because the office of the papacy refuses to come on the show, unfortunately.

I do know when I was baptized into the Armenian church, they covered me in oil that smelled like salted meat.

Gotta get the brining juice out.

Yeah, it smelled like Bostroma, man.

We may have a better chance now because, like, think about Robert Privost is, at the end of the day, Pope Leo is, at the end of the day, a dude from Chicago.

Yeah, he's the only Pope that has a very good chance to have once tasted fago.

Yeah, we could be like, Your Holiness, we want you to come on to talk about disco demolition night at Kamiski Park in 1979.

And he might actually say yes.

Your holiness, I have one thing to ask you.

Are you down with the clown?

Yeah, but I can't believe we now have a pope who is more than likely her chief keef.

I mean, in fairness, he spent almost his entire career in Peru.

So, hey, let us believe.

That's what the church is all about.

Even Jesus Christ loves Salsa, much like these bitches love Salsa.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

In northern Italy, you have the split between the papists, which are known as the Guelphs, and the Imperialists, which are known as the Ghibellines.

Modena was Ghibelline, and Bologna was Guelph.

As the war raged on between the Papal forces and the Imperial forces, it did in northern Italy as well, being a smaller part of a much larger conflict that also meant that this entire thing in Italy turned into more of a settling of local beefs kind of thing than anything to do with popes or emperors.

It's very important also just to recall that, yeah,

the idea of having total autonomy as a city-state to be like, us, the citizens of Modena, famous for our balsamic vinegar, are going to war with the citizens of Bologna, famous for their preserved meats.

We're going to make the world's most fucked up salad.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's just like, on a long enough timeline, this is going to get so annoying that the city-state of Milan is going to put all of them between two very hot pieces of metal and flatten them out.

Operation Panini is a go.

This went on for years, even through different kings and emperors and popes.

And eventually, Otto of Brunswick was selected as emperor, who was pro-pope, and he was thought to be able to bring the conflict to an end.

But then, just as he was about to do it, he did an anti-papist heel turn, got excommunicated, and then boom, Frederick II is now emperor.

Frederick hated Otto and the Pope, and the Pope excommunicated him too, but unlike other people, he didn't let that slow him down.

Meanwhile, in northern Italy, the Guelph-led Lombard lead lead had formed.

So, Frederick invaded in 1237 and crushed them, and was excommunicated yet again.

He continued his advance, and this led to a very funny incident where the Pope called for a council of church leaders to come up with a better plan for the war, only for Frederick to hear about it through spies, and then sent a fleet to intercept them.

So they got in a running sea battle with a fleet of archbishops and cardinals, killing thousands of people, but successfully kidnapping dozens of high-ranking church officials.

But not the Pope.

That would would have been, we would have had a pope napping.

Still, the war went on and on, with different popes dying and coming to power, negotiations with Frederick failing, and Frederick once again attacking in the direction of Rome.

The only thing that finally brought it all to an end was Frederick dying in 1250.

But with that, the political factions between the two parties were not going away at this point.

And the war between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope was over, but the Italians in northern Italy were still split along those lines, and they continued to fight and kill one another between those factions for seemingly no reason at all.

And the lines between these parties, between the Gluffs and the Ghibellins, were never really firm.

The most famous Italian families and cities like the Grimaldi or the Spinola or the names that you've probably heard of, you know, switched sides pretty frequently over the years, but the sides remained.

nonetheless, and they were just used as an excuse to settle local and regional power beefs between Italian city-states.

And while I keep making this seem like really, really petty, like local stuff, which sometimes it was, but other times it absolutely wasn't.

Between the two sides, they were empowered by people they claimed to support.

They would go on full military campaigns against other city-states and regions and take them over.

Then the emperor or the pope, whichever side happened to be doing the conquering, whether it be the Guelphs or the Ghibellines, would then be turned to their Pope or their emperor and be like, look, what I've taken over, acknowledge my conquests in the name of the church.

And then they would.

And then the pope would call a mini crusade against people or cities that had turned against him.

And then they would offer the Guelphs indulgences and rewards for taking certain cities that would become pro-imperial or had attacked a Guelph place, you know?

So there's a lot of very small scale stuff happening, but then you've got full-on papal crusades happening between Italian city-states.

My brain is stuttering and falling apart trying to perceive this because there's a Guelph in Canada and then there's Bologna, the sandwich meat, and there's Modena, the fucking balsamic vinegar.

And all this stuff is getting thrown around.

I'm just sort of like, I'm trying to perceive it as a North American can perceive warring city-states fighting heel-tur and X-communications, WWE shit.

Like, just all of this, I think the total lack of coherence or like the fact that like you've got decisions being made by individual actors at a very low level that like normally you can't like like I don't know Lincoln Park Chicago can't just decide to go to war with, I don't know, fucking Buffalo Grove in the Chicago suburbs.

You know what I mean?

I mean, there was that time that Michigan invaded Ohio

and there was no

by a 23-year-old governor.

I love the idea of like the Louisville suburbs decide to go to war with Santa Claus, Indiana.

Like, that's this is the like that's the distances we're talking about here, but like, obviously, those are not city-states, they're entirely different entities.

I gotta say, you fucked me up in the beginning because when you said Lincoln Park, I thought you meant like the banned Lincoln Park.

Like, what if Lincoln Park went went to war against metallica and maybe that's how chester actually died

yeah it's because the guitarist who wears the big headphones went to war against the turntablist who in turn went to get went to war against mike shinoda yeah you can don't go to war against mike schnoda he is that man is unaging and undying

oh god man oh now guys if that isn't confusing enough At the end of all this, the Guelphs end up being the dominant force in northern Italy, leading to, of course, a fracture between the black and white Guelphs.

So now the Guelphs, the pro-papal faction, split because Pope Boniface VIII, to make a very long story short, was unpopular.

He was very, he was taking back a lot of power for the church, which is what the Guelphs were supposed to want in the first place.

But the black Guelphs supported him because to them, of course, the Pope is infallible because of papal infallibility, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, the whites decided that the Pope had taken too much power and influence, which is ironic coming because that's the whole point of this faction in the first place.

For example, Dante of Divine Comedy Fame, he was a white Guelph.

So, like, this faction is splitting even more and getting dumber as we go.

God damn, where are my white Guelphs at?

The white Guelphs are just Ghibellines at this point, but they refuse to say it.

Man, these Matrix sequels keep getting more and more confusing.

This fracture resulted in infighting, allowing the Ghibellines to make a resurgent.

Now, by the 1300s, the two groups were so splintered, powerful, but also full of a kind of unexplainable, bitter hatred that both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor of the day kind of openly hated both factions that claimed to support them.

Well, if you're the Pope, you have two different factions.

It's stupid.

So that brings us to the time of our story where Modena, controlled by Ghibellines, and Bologna, controlled by the Guelphs.

The two states had hated each other for decades at this point, and Bologna had already invaded and taken over over land from Modina in 1296.

Now, weirdly enough, it was not the Guelphs who started this, but rather the Ghibellines of Modina, then led by the Marcus of Ferreira, Ozzo VIII.

Side note here, Dante in Inferno alleges that Ozzo probably came to power because he murdered his own father.

Yep, this would explain why the other Modinan nobles really, really fucking hated him.

Maybe he didn't wear the frilliest collars and finest white denim pants, which is we all know, was the norm amongst Italian nobles.

Whatever the reason, nobody likes him.

So Ozzo kind of becomes like a full-throated Ghibelline so far as like he wants to go to war against the Guelphs to save face, which he wasn't doing before this.

And then he absolutely gets his teeth kicked in.

I have to suggest something really dumb, and I've mentioned it before, but there's a terrible pan-European miniseries called Borgia, Faith, and Fear, with Northern Irish actor Mark Ryder playing Cesare Borgia and John Doman, the guy who played the police chief in the wire, playing Rodrigo Borgia.

And you will actually, because it's just, there's like a trillion characters and they bring in so many of the people from Italian history from this time, it will actually make a little bit more sense of like Ferrara and the Swarza clan and all this stuff getting involved because it's so confusing.

Also, it's like world's best costume design, world's worst writing, and every episode shows topless women.

Like, it's just softcore porn.

I strongly recommend it, though.

I hope that John Doman got a lot of tax-free Euros for being in that production.

But, my God, I'm just saying, it weirdly has helped me conceive of this when you start talking about it.

I do have to say, I think that's the first softcore porn the show has ever given the recommendation for.

Yeah, yeah, we go for hardcore only.

Yeah, it's called Gikio Mishimo.

That T-Rex shit.

Joe, I know you're joking about the skin-tight white jeans, but from looking it up, Giorgio Armani's family lived in Milan for like a thousand years.

So there is likely a descendant of the.

My jokes have layers, Tom.

Layers.

It's likely that there was an Armani cloak maker involved in all this.

The world's tightest cloak.

It's like, you know, when you see guys from the gym who are like obviously roided up and they're wearing like those super deep V-neck t-shirts.

Yeah, like our combat uniforms from the intros.

Like a V so deep dick and balls are hanging out the top.

Then, as if all of this wasn't bad enough, he gets overthrown by a coalition of rebel cities after trying to include those cities as a part of a bride price to Charles II of Naples and a political marriage to his daughter.

He was replaced by a named Pasarino Benicolci.

His entire house were Ghibellines, but more important than that is he was a direct agent of the Holy Roman Emperor, Louis IV.

So he's effectively a spy.

Bonicolce and his house were much more powerful than Azzo was.

His family had already effectively become dictators of Mantua, and their house would eventually just be swallowed by an even more powerful house and both Italy and, of course, American college basketball, Gonzaga.

Ten people will appreciate that.

Thank you.

I laughed a little.

I laughed a little, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Next thing you know, he's going to be taking a, there's going to be an intervention by a French count by the last name of Marquette.

You know, There might be a surprise last-minute fucking naval blockade held by the Count of Villanova.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, we're just going to start naming random fucking liberal arts colleges with good basketball teams.

Nobody ever sees the Connecticut State women's team coming.

Yeah, exactly.

The Jesuits get involved when the fucking Loyola just shows up.

I do think that's how the last Pope was selected is his supporters of the Jesuit college dunked on his opponents.

Getting absolutely posterized to become pope.

We just have to keep throwing all of these references to specifically greater Chicagoland region basketball and other sports.

And we can just through the ether contact Pope Leo XIV.

That's his number, right?

He's the 14th, isn't he?

I'm not sure of how many Leos we're working with here off the top of my head.

Yeah,

well, I hope I didn't get it wrong, but yeah, we're trying to contact him to bring him on so he can talk about.

I don't know.

He can give us the papal and Roman Catholic hierarchical perspective on whether or not Richard Daly was a good or a bad mayor.

I need to know via papal bull if Napoleon's mausoleum was just full of

Fifix.

I just love the idea that off-kilter at slightly transgressive history comedy podcast, Lions Led by Donkeys, manages to score doing like a mini-series with the current Pope to watch every episode of The Last Dance.

This could happen.

Pope Leo, come on, Lions Led by Robots.

Watch Ava with us.

Yeah, we will watch the documentary about Michael Jordan and his really fucked up jeans that he wore in the early 2000s.

And while all of this is going on, Modanese men, mostly civilians, though, sometimes it's framed as like local gangsters.

So you can, you know, sub in the like soprano style stereotypes here, keep slipping over the Bolognese border.

I'm trying really hard not to say Bologna's border.

So it's just slipping in my meat sauce.

Oh,

one after another, they just keep slipping in.

You know, first they come dressed as celery and then onions and then carrots and then the hardest point is getting them all to stay for a long period of time so they could be slow cooking.

Yeah, I was going to say,

you've got to keep things at a low simmer, and it's very difficult in northern Italy in the 1300s, you know, to simmer for an extended period of time.

Citing both stuff that I've randomly encountered from reading and that also the TV series Borgia, it seems to me that noblemen would also just have what they call bravi, which is like guys with big sticks.

I got some platinos geezers, but the Italian version of it.

Italian geezers.

They had like, I have 200 geezers and they're like, the best way to conceive of them is something between mercenaries and like football hooligans, but they serve a feudal lord.

Or like

that weird Italian game that still goes on now in some regional place.

I forget exactly where.

Where it's just like MMA and rugby had a baby.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just like dudes who do that now, but back then did this.

It's like, I got a small army of guys named Francesco.

They do nothing but fucking growth hormone and cocaine.

That like rugby-MMA hybrid is like happens once a year and it's like played between the four corners of the city for no money, only the honor of the city.

And everybody's just getting grievously injured.

It's super entertaining.

Everybody involved is absolutely a Nazi.

It's just one of those things.

It's like the simultaneous existence of past and present in Italy that like you can have a guy speaking pure Sicilian dialect, doing all of the hand gestures and all of the things that you associate with Italians, like gold chains, open shirt, probably used cocaine a lot, but his parents are from Sri Lanka.

And it's like, choose a change a couple of variables, and that is no different than it's ever been in Italy, ever.

It's like, it's always been like this, except in the past, he would have been from Sri Lanka, he would have been from Malta or something like that.

You know what I mean?

But like, it was always like that, or he's Albanian.

The black eagle of Albania is doing the hand thing

with the Italian hand gestures.

The prime minister of Australia, you know, Anthony Albanese, who's absolutely getting called a wog growing up in Australia because he's fucking Italian and his last name means the Albanian in Italian.

It's like, do you actually know Italy?

Come on.

I cannot not picture just a group of like the most growth hormones out Fricos that this dude has like summoned to slip over the Bolognese border and start robbing people.

What is being described in this isn't necessarily a military operation.

It's like if, I don't know, like the situation from jersey shore conducted a military operation it's a whole bunch of dudes going over and just like punching people stabbing them stealing things and setting barns on fire like there nobody's taking land it's just a country side wide like rolling yeah it's it's like a it's a raid basically but it's not a raid in like the tactical sense it's just like brigands yeah just doing just robbing people yeah you're getting run for your shoes italian style

everybody's getting run for their fucking leather loafers that they're not wearing socks in by a small army of franchescos dressed as clowns.

I hate it when someone runs up to me with a stick with a knife with a fucking huge nail through and says, Run me those pantaloons.

I hate to get robbed by a guy whipping around in the medieval version of a BMW M3.

Just a really shiny horse.

There was probably an Etruscan guy who was really suave in the club, did too much of the medicinal powder and couldn't get it up.

I mean, come on.

This is eternal in Italy.

I'm telling you.

As a result of all this going on, Pope John XXII declared Bonicolsi a rebel against the church and offered indulgences against anyone who would go to war against him and his city.

Now, there's a lot more to this conflict as well.

Like the Pope, the Emperor, whoever, they don't give a shit about any of these cities or or their rulers.

The Emperor and the Pope, even as far as the history of these two positions went, really, really personally hated one another.

Before becoming Emperor, Louis was in conflict with Frederick I of Austria over the Holy Imperial Throne.

The Pope supported Frederick, but during a vote for the position, Louis had won.

So rather than accept the results, the Pope issued a papal bull giving the Pope the right to administer the empire rather than the Emperor completely fucking Louis over.

So this obviously infuriates Louis, who then sends an army into northern Italy in 1322, while the Pope declared a crusade against Milan and I assume the finest cloaks.

Pope John was an Avignon pope.

So like Louis eventually declared an anti-pope in Rome to spite him.

We could go down this pope hole all day, but what you should know in the purpose of this story is that this blow-up between a small army of brigands running each other for loafers with sharpened sticks at Modena and Bologna.

It's another Pope-Emperor proxy war, effectively.

I was just going to say as a side note that if you're familiar or you're interested in the works of Michelangelo Morisi di Caravaggio, it's actually useful because of the fact that in a kind of anachronistic way, he painted a lot of biblical scenes where people were wearing contemporary clothes of the time very close to where this is being described.

And so some of the biblical scenes, but even some of the paintings like the card sharps, for example, that would give you an idea of how these people looked while they were doing these feats of brigandage and scheming vizier chat brackets, Italian, things along those lines.

Soon Bolognese soldiers conducted their own cross-border raids.

And again, these are just Italian geysers with like farm implements mostly.

They're hitting Modinese farms.

They're stealing.

They're burning as they go.

And I should point out here that the Bolognese are much, much more powerful on face value than the Modinese.

They have more men, they have more money, they have more everything, really.

They're just much bigger.

so each time the modanese hit back the bolognese would hit them even harder and they would sometimes bring actual formations of soldiers as much as they had them because both

very small standing armies a lot of these italian city-states mostly relied on mercenaries to have a standing army so it's not like they had you know call in the battalions or whatever so most of these are just dudes who have weapons at home and what amounts to be like local city watchmen.

But civilians and regular people are the bulk of it, and they get involved in the conflict.

And now they're pissed that their farms are getting torched, at which point they form their own mobs to raid across the border and burn their farms.

And a lot of these groups of civilians are effectively led by like their local mayors.

It all comes back, though, this is just basically turning into Chicago again.

It's like sometimes it's Italy, sometimes it's eternal Italy, sometimes it's the Ur Italy that's existed throughout, you know, since the Big Bang.

Sometimes it's just randomly Chicago.

Like, I'm struggling for an accurate metaphor or comparison to make here.

It's very funny to think that these people are being led into combat, more like gang warfare, by the local city administrators.

It's wonderful.

I can't imagine ever being whipped up into a frenzy by like the Detroit City Council.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know, man.

We're going to go invade Pontiac.

Woohoo!

I mean, to be fair, Kwame would have done it.

Yeah, I mean,

I was trying to think about something.

It's like getting led to go commit crimes by your mayor.

It's like, well, I guess we can.

I mean, there's so many examples we can pull from, but in this case, it's like it's not even necessarily like the senior office.

It sounds like it could be just like the sort of town alderman, even.

Yeah.

It's like your borough president, your community board association fucking leader is like, anyway, so I've got a couple of cases of small arms and some ammunition.

We're going to go raid the other postcode.

Nate, it's as if the mayor of the borough of Newham went to Millwall matches to

West Ham matches to fight Millwall.

I mean,

yeah, I'm sure that actually happened in the 70s.

He certainly wasn't going to Millwall to watch good football.

And if you, yeah, and if you had a recording of it, like, it would break the sound barrier for racism.

At one point, a local mayor in Bologna led a group of civilians on a two-week-long rampage across the Modinese countryside, killing dozens of people.

Modina responds by allying with Mantua and borrowing soldiers from them and invading and taking over a Bolognese castle called Monteveglio.

Then on one night in 1325, a group of these Modanese men, we don't know who they were, what office they were supposed to represent, but it was probably mostly just some guys.

Again, picture shirtless men, juiced to the fucking gills on growth hormone, but wearing wearing the nicest pantaloons and loafers you've ever seen.

They sneak into Bologna and they steal a bucket from the public well.

The Modanese, delighted with their glorious war trophy, pull back to their city and proudly display their ill-gotten bucket at the city hall.

The next day, Bolognese officials hear about what happened and they demand multiple things, namely, all of this stolen shit to be returned to them.

Because, you know, they're raiding, they're stealing property, they're stealing animals money anything that's not bolted down and they're burning the shit that is bolted down and return the castle that had been seized and also return the fucking bucket if they refuse it would mean open war not any more of this uh getting ran for your shit in the night kind of stuff like well actually we're gonna we're gonna hire mercenaries and we're gonna fuck each other up Modina refuse.

So with the Pope's blessing, Bologna musters its army.

And this is where things get, well, I would say this is where things get weird, but it's already been really weird here for about 45 minutes.

Because of the open involvement of the church in the war, there's no shortage of volunteers.

It's the same shit we've talked about in countless Crusader episodes now, because the Pope effectively calls a crusade, and he already had against Bonaculci, the leader.

Like, he offers indulgences, which meant soon tens of thousands thousands of random people from outside of the region are coming in to take him up on his offer.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the religious call to arms, just like any crusade doesn't.

It's full of poor, desperate people looking to secure the Pope bag.

It's a green light from the highest office in the land to steal everything you can find and keep it in the name of Christ.

Bologna formally requesting Modina let them borrow their bucket back.

Run that fucking bucket back to me, bitch.

We really need some balsamic to go with our bologna and we're going to invade south until we find someone who's really good with bread.

But until then, I think I just invented a really disgusting sandwich.

I mean, a little bit of balsamic vinegar on a sandwich can be really good, actually.

I mean, here's the thing with the Italians, right?

Like, we make fun of them for a lot of things, and rightfully so, but they...

Food is good, and the sandwiches are exceptional.

They make a good sandwich, you know?

I know I'm hungry.

It's not like East Coast hot sandwich in America where the guy makes fun of you for your order level.

It's a whole different culture, but they're good.

You know, they're respect them.

They probably had sandwiches back then of a sort.

You know what I mean?

They hadn't invented tomatoes yet because they hadn't stolen it from the New World, but they made do with what they had.

I really like the story of like when tomatoes are first introduced to Italy and killed tons of people.

Did they really?

I mean, I remember people saying that.

I don't know if that might be apocryphal or not, but yeah, I've heard it repeated a few times.

People thought they were poisonous for sure because

they were just ornamentals, that these are like nightshade berries, big nightshade berries, basically.

I also find it very funny that the way they made it into the Middle East is that they call them, in Arabic, they're called banjanrumi, which is a Roman eggplant.

So, yeah, you know, at the end of the day, yeah, why not?

Also, let's not talk about eggplants because the Italians use it to be racist.

And I'm not joking.

Oh, nothing about this surprises me.

So.

Once word gets around that Bologna is calling men to arms, they were flooded by tens of thousands of volunteers.

Like I said, not only from Bologna, but from surrounding cities, as everyone rushed in to take part in this.

There is even unconfirmed reports that the Pope himself commanded a personal contingent of troops to Bologna to rally people to the cause.

Soon, Bologna had massed an army of around 30,000 men, though virtually none of them were soldiers.

These were just some guys who had weapons.

I mean, this could happen now because, I mean, Pope Leo spent so much time in Peru, you know he ministered to members of the Shining Path.

He probably understands some fucking Maoist insurgency catholic maoist insurgency what a cursed sentence we've got the woke maoist pope i can't i can't wait for his uh first diktat

so some of these people ship didn't even have weapons and they were hoping that they'd be given one they were not um so they just kind of upended some farm tools that were laying around but they do have 32 000 people who are clearly very comfortable with committing large-scale violence.

But again, like I said, these people are not seasoned soldiers, and neither were their commanders.

These are not hardened infantry or cavalry commanders or anything.

Most of them had no military experience whatsoever.

But like before, they were local city administrators who had leveraged their position and wealth into an official command position.

So yeah, the mayor paid a bribe and became captain mayor.

Modina had the opposite problem.

Despite the people of the city being Ghibellines or, you know, pro-imperial Catholics, This was more of a nobility thing.

And yeah, there was some bad blood between the two of them due to all the raids, but you know, their leader had just been greenlighted by the pope.

He had been declared a rebel, you know, indulgences against him.

There's a crusade marching their way, but the pope did not extend his anger to the people or the city of Modina.

So as long as they stayed the fuck out of it, if you're a regular Modinese person, you're good.

So they did.

They just didn't enlist to fight in the war.

It's like that saying, what if they declared war, just none of of us showed up?

That's what the Modinese did.

Like, you handle your shit, we'll be at home.

But that was perfectly fine to Bonicolsi and his imperial backers.

They had no intention of levying their own mob of idiots together to go get smoked by the papists.

Instead, the Holy Roman Emperor sent thousands of professional knights from Germany, commanded by the leader of the Ghibellines in Italy, Azone Viscante, Lord of Milan, who is a hardened battlefield commander.

Though, they did only muster 7,000 people.

And as bad as this sounds, and it does not sound good, the Modinese immediately took the upper hand, marching towards the city of Zopolino in Bologna.

Previous to this, the Bolognese had a hard time mustering their force for reasons you can probably imagine, because it's just a mob of randos.

It wasn't organized into units and any functional thing.

It was just a bunch of Giuseppes and Andrettis who showed up to do violence one day, and their commanders had no idea how to marshal that many people around.

so some parts of their army would just kind of go out and do their own thing to retake land or or raid other parts some just sat around arguing with one another all while an army of german terminators advance across the italian countryside crashing through mobs of armed people with like who had knives and pickaxes and i assume ants on their feet or something i don't know like this is such an annoyingly me reference to make but like i guess i didn't realize that the final fight series was actually a metaphor for 14th century northern Italy.

Because when you think about it, the clans like the Andors, you know, you've got all the family members, people just using random implements or whatever.

At one point, like, you just have a bonus level where you just punch a car until it explodes.

Like, this sounds like it's comparable.

It's like we thought it was just random violence in like an 80s, early 90s skyscrolling fighting game, but actually, no, this was a very nuanced and complex allegory for Italy in the 1300s.

What if we put the Pope in the street fighter level where he has to to fight the car?

How long does it take the Pope to destroy that car?

Pope punches a horse so hard it explodes.

So that's effectively saying that Mayor Mike Hagger is the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

He's the shepherd of the faithful.

Yeah.

I like their chances more if it was like Bishop Dalsim or Bishop Blanca, the green guy.

There's not really any good Italian.

There aren't any Italians to speak of in the Street Fighter world.

It's because they just surrender immediately.

Well, no, exactly.

Fuck me.

But you've got Blanca, who was turned green by electricity in Brazil somehow.

You've got Vega, the Spanish guy, who wears the mask and has the claws.

You have, yeah, you've got, I'm trying to think of any other.

Do they have any other European characters?

It's been a very long time.

There's the Russian guy.

There's Zangief.

Yeah, that's true.

We all know Zangeev.

We all have a fondness for Zangef.

I am fine.

In the conclave of the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast, I vote in favor of Pope Blanca I.

Give us the green electrical-powered Pope.

But then the question becomes, which Street Fighter character is each member of this show?

Tom is Zengef.

You 100% look like bisexual Zengief.

You've said so yourself.

Yes, yes.

Joe, I feel like who you look like versus who you act like.

You act like Ken, but you look like Colonel Guile.

And I mean, everyone's going to make the comparison to me with the red hair with Blanca, but like, I, Blanca has way more chest hair than I do.

And also, like, he's also in way better shape than me, but I guess I can't really think of another one.

Yeah, Blanca's got that mutant

gaked-ness to him, you know?

Yeah, yeah, he listened to MC Bin Laden, and it turned him green and huge.

So, Ani is Chung Li, then?

I suppose.

I mean, yeah, Ani could be Chung Li.

She just can pirouette kick the shit out of all of us.

I'm happy with that.

I think we're in a good place.

I'm glad we're laying down this lore.

Yeah, we're laying down this lore in the middle of an episode about medieval, you know, boring city-states in northern Italy.

We have decided that

Blanca became the way that he did because he listened to Biley Funk on cocaine.

Long may he reign, or whatever it is they say about his holiness, the Blanca I.

Finally, when it became clear that the Modinese army was heading towards the city of Zappolino, the Pope and the Bolognese administrators, now in charge of the army, managed to get all of their local idiots to walk in the same direction, forming up outside the same city, and managing to get around 30,000-ish men to hang around.

We're not entirely sure how many.

Now in the Modinese camp, they obviously knew they couldn't just storm ahead and smash into such a large number of people.

Knights or not, they'd eventually get slowed down by the sheer volume of pasta sauce at some point.

So on November 15th, 1325, elements of the Modanese army feigned a retreat, withdrawing across a nearby river.

I assume by alluring them over by snapping a bunch of spaghetti noodles in half, like a kind of RPG-esque provoke spell for Italians.

We aren't entirely sure how many of the Modanese played the role of bait, but it's thought to be at least a thousand of them to pull off as many of the Bolonese soldiers as they could.

Meanwhile, the Bolonese administrators completely lost control of their forces.

Thousands, nobody's sure how, but it's thought to be like maybe 15,000 or something.

Min just chased off across the river after these people, completely devoid of any orders or leadership.

Then, Visconti and Bonacolsi, facing off against the other 15,000 or so men, ordered their 2,000 heavy knights on horseback to charge directly into them.

This worked.

What happened next could best be described as a thresher hitting a field of wheat.

What probably happened, as we've talked about before on this show, because really in-depth accounts of this battle are kind of hard to come by.

What probably happened is these heavy knights smashed into these barely armed infantrymen, and everyone not at the front of the rank immediately tried to run.

This probably created some kind of human crush as people were unable to get away because they were pinned against the walls of the city.

Not that many people died in the battle for how many people took part in it.

So pretty much over about an hour or two, most of the people in the Bolognese army just took that time to try to run, which included trampling their own people around them.

They shattered.

They ran as fast as they could.

And due to the amount of people there, they could not run very fast.

Like, the press of bodies kept them in place in some cases.

Like, the knights, it was said, like, killed someone, and the force of human bodies around them just kept them standing.

That's how many people got pinned in there.

Jesus.

Around a thousand people died.

Yeah.

I feel like if you were a 14th-century Italian peasant and this happened to you, you would just react the same way we react when you're playing a notionally free, non-bounded video game, but the game direction and opponent AI is set up in such a way you're not allowed to advance to this level yet.

Like, if you try, then, like, the fucking, you know, like armored cavalry riding gundam horses shows up and just completely destroys you.

And you're like, oh, I'm not supposed to do this quest yet.

Because

it's level capped.

You can't get over there yet.

You haven't completed the main quest enough to unlock the branch of the skill tree where you get a sword.

I really fucking hate it when I try to...

go to war over a bucket and then the enemy casts literal Knights of the Round on me.

This is the closest anyone's experience in real life to having Knights of the Round deployed on them.

That is true.

They just get Knights to the face.

And by the time the men who got pulled away by the bait realized what was happening, they could not run over, nor did they want to.

They never even made an attempt to go back and support the main force.

And they mostly ran.

They didn't really fight.

When the bait turned on them and attacked, they just ran as fast as they could.

I mean, I do feel like this is a common story in this time and later as well, where you have these kinds of like more or less ad hoc mobs and auxiliaries and irregulars.

And then

they come into contact with like a kind of professional soldier, particularly like heavy cavalry or like a heavier munition than they were expecting.

And it just completely turns everything on its head.

And it's like, yeah, jokes aside, this is

sort of like, oh, I thought we were just going to be doing a little skirmishing.

It's very rude of you to bring out those 155 millimeter self-propelled howitzers.

But in this case, it's also just extremely funny because it's like, yeah, they were expecting to be like, you know, swinging sticks and farm implements and doing aggressive hand gestures while the people they were fighting were doing defensive hand gestures.

And then all of a sudden, a bunch of huge guys on huge horses shows up.

And it's like, that's so fun.

We realized that we needed to bring in some professionals.

And so we brought in all of these psychotic Germans and their armored horse.

Yeah, because I mean, like, at the time, I mean, that was kind of the thing is who were the, you know, European nobles and kings paying the services of in order to just do, just lay waste and clove people in twain.

And it was either Germans or Swiss.

Like, that's who they were.

The Swiss mercenaries were like a thing for this reason.

The German Landis Connect were a thing like this as well.

It's just, hey, you know what?

These guys are huge with huge swords and they swing them a lot and they're pretty good at it.

And it's like, they can probably solve your problem for you.

The Italian hand gestures are not very effective against like a Zweihander.

Like if you're doing the Italian version of the jutsus from Naruto,

it'd be like World War II bombers that you have like a professional engraver like take your Zweihander and fucking engrave like the

Chevoy hands for every Italian that you fucking just fully just cut in two.

And so like the guys with a lot of Italian campaigning experience, it's like Rococo designs all over their swords.

They've just got so many severed hands.

I mean, I love the idea also that that's the Italian defensive mechanism is that as a guy is swinging a big sword and the last thing you do is go, hey, what are you doing?

That kind of a thing.

Now they're at the gates of Zeppelino and the gates are wide open for the taking.

So did the Modinese march in and take the city?

No.

They did arguably the funniest thing they could have done and might be one of the funniest things to go down in the annals of military history and what could only be described as stunting on a motherfucker.

All right, I'm in.

I'm in.

I'm curious.

Instead of seizing the city, storming in and taking, which would have been very easy at this point, they organized a series of horse races and feasts right outside the city walls so they could see just how much they whooped their ass.

They did not invite anybody from inside the city.

They had to watch.

I love doing ye old money spread on my enemies

just with turkey legs.

Making it rain, but since everything is coin-based, you're making it fucking hail on a motherfucker.

Yeah, yeah.

My haters show up armed to the teeth and then just immediately have a barbecue.

And they're like, no, there's no need to fight.

We've already won.

This is what you could have had.

You were flying off.

A short time later, the two sides came to a peace treaty.

All the things taken by Modina were returned in exchange for money.

An agreement was made that everything would just go back to how they'd always have been before the war.

And that is how one of the largest battles in medieval European history ended.

But the bucket was never returned.

This is where we have to spoil everybody's fun.

I kind of alluded to this in the very beginning.

This war, like I said, is generally known as the War of the Oaken Bucket and has infamously gone down in history as that time two crazy city-states went to war over a bucket.

This is a history the two cities themselves tell today, and the stolen bucket is still on display in Modena.

If it actually is the bucket, nobody's actually sure.

I think we pretty decently explained why all of the reasons why this had much more to do with a lot of other things than a bucket, but where does the story of the bucket come from?

Well, what we know about this history comes from one guy, Matteo Graffoni, a Bolinese historian of the time.

And one of the sources I use for this episode, it's a source that anybody that writes about this is going to have to use.

It's pretty much the only in-depth history written about the battle and the war.

And in turn, people focused on the part about the bucket because, admittedly, it's pretty funny.

And by all accounts, a bucket was actually stolen.

And it wasn't stolen for any other reason for than like a subtle fuck you.

Like they stole riches, they stole land they stole buildings whatever but like we also just

stole buildings i mean like they took them over they took over a castle but not like katamari damashi like fucking rolling them up and taking them away

very confirmed yeah italian 14th century italian katamari damashi would be i'd play that game undefeated they also came in and stole the local bucket for their well as like it's just a big middle finger you know so that's why they would take it but eventually a poem was written about the war which focused on the bucket because again, it is a ridiculous aspect of the story.

Kind of like before when we talked about the pastry war, right?

Like focus on the most ridiculous part of the story and soon that becomes the whole story.

And eventually, this is exactly what happens.

The poem becomes more read and more well known than Griffoni's history.

Modina in turn adopts that version of the story as its actual history.

And now suddenly the bucket is the center point.

It's held in the museum and City Hall.

At first, it's a relic and then a war trophy.

And now it's a symbol of victory against all odds.

Now it's the cause of the war itself in general.

Everybody loves talking about the time a bunch of people murdered each other over a bucket.

It's ridiculous.

It's just such a great ploy by Medina's tourist board.

It's like, yeah, what if we just put the bucket on display?

It'll be a reason for people to come here.

They actually have two of them on display.

One is, I believe, in City Hall, and the other one is in the museum.

And one they claim is the original one, and the other is a recreation, which is funny because that means once upon a time they had to hire a guy to recreate an old wooden bucket, but also because nobody can confirm it's the actual real bucket at all.

It's like having like, what if Philadelphia had two Liberty Bells?

It was like the Liberty Bell of the Anti-Pope Liberty Bell.

Yeah, exactly.

We just, why not?

It's the bucket and the anti-bucket.

I'd believe it, quite frankly.

I mean, I think you've talked about more absurd things that are true on this episode already.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, like, the bucket existed.

It was known to have been stolen.

But I guess it's a lot more fun to explain that time that like a thousand dudes got murdered by German armored Terminators than like over a bucket than to try to explain 300 years of war history involving empires, churches, emperors, popes, anti-popes, anti-kings, and anti-emperors and all that other shit.

So I guess what I'm saying is fuck it.

It's about a bucket.

The end.

I can't wait for the new pope to create the right in the center of the Colosseum, the anti-bean, just a giant metal bean in the middle of Rome.

That's right.

Fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support us on Patreon.

Ask us on Patreon or in the Discord, which you'll also have access to, and we will answer it on air.

And today's question is actually, since you guys have other shows as well, feel free to answer it based on those other shows or this one, whichever.

And that is, what is something that you thought was innocuous or uncontroversial that you said on a podcast or online in general that received a lot of pushback slash criticism slash quote drama?

I could immediately think of one.

I mean, obviously, we've done a lot of shit on like stupid Nazis and racists.

And I always expect those people to get mad at me because they are who they are.

But we did a series on the Russian invasion of Georgia a few years ago.

And there's a certain kind of person that got very, very, very very mad at what, in my opinion, is a very simple stance.

And that is, Russia is bad for invading someone and taking over pieces of its territory.

But nowadays, though, we are all much more aware of that kind of guy, I will say.

But back then, I was not.

But I will say, I don't really care about that kind of thing.

If you're a psycho that supports Russia invading Georgia or Ukraine or whoever, I don't fucking care about you.

Your opinion means less than nothing to me.

But I was delightfully surprised that that a lot of Georgians on the internet were very, very cool, surprisingly cool with an Armenian-American guy doing a few hours of content on Georgian history.

So that was very nice.

And my thoughts go out to my Georgian friends and listeners for everything going on in Georgia right now, which is another statement that'll piss off the same group of people that the first statement pissed off.

So if that upsets you, I wish bad things onto you.

What was your guys's?

I feel like the series that I've done here has brought ire from like the most surprising corners of the internet.

Like, I've talked about it before when we did the Trouble series.

Like, unionists didn't really care that much, mainly because they're all illiterate.

Well, I remember people getting really mad at you guys for laughing at what happened to Lord Mountbatten and basically

laugh at the families of the kids who died.

It's like, no, we're not at all, not in the slightest, but like, this is the first, like, I'm sorry, but you are, you are effectively taking a position of British imperialism and English nationalism in Northern Ireland and being like, oh, have you thought about the collateral damage and civilian casualties?

It's like a thing you famously fucking care about.

Right, right.

We've gotten so much weird shit about that one.

Yeah, alternatively, like, I've had, I still get like the odd person angry about the RAF series because they're like, oh, you know, they'll alternatively call me like a lab or they'll call me a conservative or they'll be like, oh, these are the God's strongest Marxist-Leninist warriors.

And I'm like, not really.

I feel like

they're just dorks.

Yeah.

The upcoming series is going to make a lot of people very mad.

That is correct.

But that kind of falls into a category we expect to piss off, you know?

Yeah.

I think.

I think weirdly for me, when it comes to stuff that I've said on a podcast, I haven't had a lot of outcry about my own position so much as I think sometimes my co-hosts and like when we've tried to thread the needle where, you know, like on Trash Future, where Riley has probably a more

skeptical position as regards the current government of Ukraine, and November is just extremely in favor of countries aren't allowed to just arbitrarily invade one another.

We can agree to disagree, and we can have a discussion and try to like flesh out those positions.

And then you find that, you know, like three people quit the Patreon, but two of them basically call us, you know, lib imperial apologists, NATO fanboys.

And then one person is basically like, you know, furious at Riley and screaming Slava Ukrainian, even though they're like a dude, like a guy from Kansas with no fucking, no link to it ever, kind of cosplay shit.

That'll happen.

I think that's inevitable.

I mean, there was a guy who basically tried to stalk me because he wanted me to get you, Joe, to atone for a passing comment about like some Chinese people dislike Mato.

No, because I made fun of Mao Zedong a few times.

Oh, no.

Yeah, I think for me,

I don't really know.

I mean, like, I haven't really had a thing where it was specifically, like, Nate is in the news for being Nate on a podcast.

But weirdly, like, I don't know.

There's been times when, in specific contexts, about like talk about a thing, like answering a question like this or doing a QA, and I talk about like what's going on in my life.

And I've had a lot of like weird hate from British people who are mad at me from leaving Britain and basically are like, we loved you before, but fuck you for leaving and fuck Switzerland and fuck you being a dad.

And it's like, well, I mean, like, it's my life, dude.

Like, I'm gonna talk about it.

What a normal thing to say.

Do you really think that's normal?

Do you think that's normal?

I just need to just finish that song.

What I'm trying to say, though, is I think weirdly, looking back on it, it's always been about stuff that's very, very innocuous or strange or in passing, or like a position that I'm not really going to go to the wall to defend.

It's just kind of an observation.

I made a passing comment one time on the Britannology we did about UK Rave comments about how, like, rave music, drum and bass, jungle, a lot of this stuff, like you could see even the 80s incarnations of it and the kind of like Second Summer of Love rave scene in the UK and things along those lines.

And a lot of like black music from America getting brought into it when you think about Chicago House and Detroit Techno and stuff like that.

And but then like what it winds up in in commercial sort of manifestations that actually get on the charts will be shit like the Happy Mondays, which they were a band that was doing creative stuff, but like they were drawing from that, but they were.

For better or worse, they were making white music for white people.

And someone got so fucking mad, but not for the reason you'd think.

They got mad for me even invoking the sacred name of Detroit Techno and Chicago House to talk about the Happy Mondays.

And I'm like, well, I'm talking about like commercialization and appropriation of a sort, but basically just flat out called me racist and quit the Patreon.

And they called me racist in the fucking exit survey.

But yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, I've tried to avoid it and I've tried to be really circumspect about stuff that I say.

I had a little bit of experience with this before because, you know, being like for better or worse, like doing veteran writing shit and talk about the war from like a critical perspective, but trying to avoid stuff that's going to be like immediately turned into you know fodder for like either i love the troops or i hate the troops stuff i i just try to be circumspect and like i i don't always succeed but oh boy do i know about that yeah let me tell you let me tell you about the the comment section under one of my books well i mean at the end of the day you can it's easy to convince yourself that you know the entire world hates you and then you realize like there's like nine people who are just saying shit from all over the world and then you're like if nine people showed up at like a reading and there was like 200 people there who were normal they'd be like yeah, you're weird, fuck off.

But when you have nine comments on a post all being like, I want you to kill yourself now, it can feel a little overwhelming.

Yeah, yeah, it does happen.

Not so much anymore else.

Yeah, it's gone away.

It's weird.

That shit's moved on somehow.

Yeah, I think people have grown up.

Maybe.

But got jobs and responsibilities and all of us just adhere by the Tyler the Creator advice.

I was like, how is cyberbullying real?

Close your eyes, go outside.

So far, so good.

Also, like i mean i gendered a lot of hate online um for being i mean just who i am um

it seems to have largely calmed down which is nice it makes me feel less shit about myself but fellas i do believe that's a podcast but you host other podcasts plug your podcasts i am the co-host and or producer of what a hell of awaits dad trash future kill james bond and no gods no mayors so they're all out there they all have patreons they all have free content too you should listen to them if you like them good i'm glad uh penet skin show about the history of everything told you, the history of tattoos.

I have actually two books coming out of Book of My Photography and then an art book coming out in July.

So check those out.

This is the only show that I host.

So thank you for listening to it.

Consider supporting us on Patreon.

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And until next time, may God bless His Holiness Blanca I.

Fair enough.