PugJesus

“But Esperanto is the future!”

lmao, !noncredibledefense@piefed.social energy

Explanation: The Knights Templar were a medieval monastic knightly order. Despite their name being dragged through the mud for any number of conspiracies and dubious histories, they were a mostly-anodyne group (by the standards of medieval European crusading military orders, which, admittedly, is not a high bar) which placed high value on contractual obligations. The members of the Order swore vows of poverty, but the Order itself was fantastically wealthy due to early banking practices, wherein they would give out loans in exchange for collateral; said collateral then being used to generate income while the loan was still owed, as charging formal interest was against Church law of the period. They were successful in no small part because of their insistence on the fulfillment of contractual obligations - that is to say, they were trustworthy.

King Philip IV of France owed a great deal of money to the Jews of France, and acted in the usual way for medieval Christian nobles in debt - he expelled the Jews rather than repay them. Free money, no more debt!

King Philip IV of France also owed a great deal of money to Italian merchants in France. So he had them arrested, those filthy money-grubbing commoners, and all their property seized. Free money, no more debt!

King Philip IV also owed a great deal of money to the Knights Templar. You can probably see where this is going.

After leveling a whole host of bizarre charges against the Templars, he used his leverage over the Pope to sanction an effective ‘blank check’ to ‘investigate’ the Order. Philip IV then had the Templars arrested en masse, confessions extracted by torture, which ‘conveniently’ confirmed all of Philip’s accusations, and then had them burned at the stake and their property seized before anything bad could happen, like the Pope dying, or the accused being able to testify at their own trials, or people looking too closely into the official accounts of Templar satanism and ritual homosexual gangbangs for all initiates.

Even at the time, it was nakedly apparent that Philip IV was just doing his best to murder his way out of his debts, and the charges weren’t really taken seriously outside of earshot of the French monarch.

Don’t tell me this is going to get worse, I’m trying to avoid the urge to play chicken with the next passing freight train.

Explanation: In the civil war of the Roman politician and conqueror Julius Caesar during the Late Republic, the Legions he had raised and fought with over long years in Gaul were fiercely loyal to Caesar and his cause. At an early point in the war, his troops vowed to serve without pay (as a temporary measure) and donated money from their own savings (kept with the Legion standards for safety’s sake, like a military bank) to fund the raising of additional troops for Caesar’s cause. They also volunteered to pay for each other’s supplies for the duration of Caesar’s financial shortage, with the richer men providing for the poorer. This was because Caesar, cut off from his contacts in Rome by the outbreak of the civil war, effectively had very little in the way of resources to call on until he could wrest support and access to Italy.

While the troops had a bit of a ‘do or die’ situation facing them, as following Caesar to begin with meant that losing and thus being branded traitors would be… disastrous for them, personally… Caesar also had several other attributes which attached the men of his Legions to him. Caesar was noted as extremely charismatic - with the conservatives in the Senate even taking measures to prevent him from meeting personally with moderates during the negotiations leading up to the civil war, for fear that he might persuade them to support a compromise.

Notably, despite being something of a notoriously vain dandy who was always up in the latest fashions (even when the fashion was regarded as ‘effeminate’) and had his body hair regularly plucked, and was a man with immense cultural and artistic sense, on the campaign trail, he was noted as living in the same rough conditions as his men. Troops love a commander who is ’one of them’, and willing to share in their hardships and ask no more of them than he would of himself. Caesar was also notably brave in personally exposing himself to danger in battle, and calm in combat, which soldiers often find reassuring.

He was also famously generous and gregarious, always seeking to reward loyalty, make friends, and with a remarkable memory, sometimes being remarked as knowing many or even all the centurions (commanders of ~80 men) in a given legion (~4800 men) by name. Despite his immensely high opinion of himself, he had a way of appearing welcoming and egalitarian even to social inferiors, and enforcing that standard on his officers and allied politicians - a good talent for any leader to cultivate! Caesar once, supposedly, said that he would reward even a bandit, if the bandit had done him a good turn. Because of this attitude of reliable reciprocity, the legionaries probably felt fairly certain that their loyalty to Caesar would be rewarded - and true to Caesar’s reputation, it would indeed be rewarded at the end of the civil war, with promotions, honorable discharges, money, land, and for some of the higher-ranking troops, support for political offices.

Funny enough, there are numerous examples of the early Imperial-era Legions acting against their own material interests. But as the Empire’s core legitimizing myth of Rome remaining a semi-democratic semi-functional city-state faded (THE EMPEROR IS JUST A REALLY POWERFUL REPUBLICAN MAGISTRATE WE SWEAR), and the stability of the Empire declined with increasingly arbitrary and ruinous Emperors, with the 3rd century AD in particular standing out for ever-escalating bribery and decay of the Empire in general and the Legions in particular. By the 4th century AD, the Legions as they were at the height of the Empire in the 1st and 2nd century AD no longer existed, save as the occasional relict unit name.

Those 4th century and 5th century AD troops sure as shit weren’t about to donate their limited resources to some abstract cause when their own wages weren’t delivered half the time, despite their leaders living with disgusting wealth! Fuck you, pay me!

Eh, not everything I post is a banger. I try to keep up one non-crosspost a day, if I find it vaguely amusing.

I didn’t notice it was GenAI when I saw it, since I didn’t look at the images closely. That’s on me. I’m not removing it since it’s already got traction, but generally I try to identify and avoid posting GenAI.

Um, AKTUALLY, MY special fixation is Unique and Interesting unlike everyone else’s, and that’s why everyone wants to hear about the ambiguous nature of minor deities in Roman household rituals 😤

FDR’s internment camps are like white-collar crime by comparison to those two. Still, he can’t be ruled out!

“I know Hitler eventually blows his brains out, but tbqh I’m getting tired of waiting. I might beat him to it at this rate.” - Me in 1939

Explanation: In the prelude to the American Revolution, the Boston Massacre happened in Colonial America. In this event, a crowd of Bostonians agitating against British soldiers (’redcoats’) on occupation duty in Boston were fired upon, and several Bostonians died.

This was, naturally, not a popular move in Boston, and most of the city was in favor of seeing the Brits hanged for excessive force (if only we could get support for that kind of oversight for policing forces in the modern US). In fact, the mood was so sour on the soldiers in question that no lawyer in Boston dared take up their case, for fear of retribution by an angry Bostonian mob.

Enter John Adams. John Adams is traditionally considered one of the Founding Fathers of the USA for his massive contributions to the political foundation of the country, and even at the time he was known as a massive Patriot (supporter of American independence). It was precisely for this reason that he could take up the defense of the British soldiers - no anti-British mob dared touch him or seriously malign his motives when he was already Public Enemy #1 of British rule.

His justification, thus, was taken at face value - that he genuinely believed that trying the accused without a proper legal defense was barbaric and could not be endured in any civilized society. And as a lawyer, he argued vehemently and to the best of his ability regardless of his personal feelings on the massacre - managing to save all the accused Redcoats from the noose, with only two of the soldiers who could be proved to have fired directly into the crowd in a panic being convicted and branded (instead of hanged).

breaks into Iran unprovoked

murders 150 schoolchildren, plus hundreds of other civilians

kills the leader of Iran

gives 30 billion to Iran to not close the Strait of Hormuz

refuses to elaborate

leaves?

Can anyone tell me the fuck was the point of any of this?

(jk, I already know it’s to distract from the domestic problem of the US president being outed as a pedophile)

That’s funny. I see nothing. NOTHING!

That being said, I must also note that, while Rome was not worse in the sense of being more essentially unjust or more imperialist than other powers, there is an element of brutality in Roman culture itself that was mildly exceptional.

The Romans, who never tired of praising themselves, admitted, regretfully, that human warmth was a virtue that their culture lacked. The Romans recognized themselves as a hard, callous people, and while some of this is chest-beating, there is an element of truth in it in that Romans both inured themselves to structured violence from a young age, and reconciled themselves to immense cruelty if done ‘procedurally’. The Romans also noted that the arena sometimes made ‘soft’ foreigners queasy - while this probably isn’t in reference to gladiators, but rather, public executions of noxii (criminals considered especially heinous, like traitors, bandits, murderers, and rapists), which could get quite… gruesome. Such as the famous ‘feed them to the lions’ trope.

On the other hand, there are any number of examples of horrific and arbitrary cruelty from other polities of the period. The difference is that the Romans generally (though not always) did so in a ‘cold’ and calculating way, while other cultures tended to do so after emotionally tumultuous events or by the order of capricious individuals.

What was the ruin of Sparta and Athens, but this, that mighty as they were in war, they spurned from them as aliens those whom they had conquered? Our founder Romulus, on the other hand, was so wise that he fought as enemies and then hailed as fellow-citizens several nations on the very same day. Strangers have reigned over us. That freedmen’s sons should be intrusted with public offices is not, as many wrongly think, a sudden innovation, but was a common practice in the old commonwealth.

…

Everything, Senators, which we now hold to be of the highest antiquity, was once new. Plebeian magistrates came after patrician; Latin magistrates after plebeian; magistrates of other Italian peoples after Latin. This practice too will establish itself, and what we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.

• The Roman Emperor Claudius

I’m also sickly and frail, I’m the perfect Victorian love interest

Fuck me, didn’t even catch that.

Bread is the very foundation of our society 🙏

“Maybe we’re just not on enough meth these days”

Extremely poor pre-modern utilization of labor in peacetime meant that the gain of war could be much greater than the expense of it, tbf.

Such is distinctly not the case nowadays.

Dad: “What makes you think he’s worth 20$!? I don’t even have 10$! Fine, here’s the 5$ you asked for!”

Image

“I lived through history!”

Funny how that is. Like accepting that it’s better to get sick today than in 1000 AD; but with the dual caveats that further improvement is still needed, and that it’s better to not get sick at all, lmao.

I think there’s a kind of strange convergent evolution with the Catholic Church’s use of Latin, but not one that it shares with Ancient Rome.

Rome used Latin aggressively as a means of cultural posturing and spreading knowledge of the Latin language - after all, if the locals understand you, that’s less trouble you have to go through to keep them in line. For Rome, they wanted the locals to come to understand Latin to streamline communication, and also to reinforce that their rulers were Roman, not local elites.

However, at the same time, Rome welcomed outside ideas into its institutions, to the point where some of the most learned and respected jurists of Roman law were Syrians, who had a long tradition of (formerly non-Roman) legal education - it was certainly not a question of restricting provincials by insisting on Latin, but by insisting on the way (ie speaking the CIVILIZED, CONQUEROR’S TONGUE) in which they were included. So it was a mixture of practicality (in creating a lingua franca and not needing to use translators all the time) and pride (GO ROME ROME STRONK) to insist on Latin.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, used Latin in the opposite way, as a means of obscuration. Since Latin, even as early as the 8th century AD, was effectively dead everywhere except Italy, and dead even in Italy by the 10th century AD, there was no question of people ‘independently’ learning it en masse the way people would learn their own native tongue, or a neighboring language. Thus the Catholic Church maintained a sort of monopoly on the precise meaning of its liturgy and holy texts (especially, in the latter, considering the low rate of literacy).

This was important not just for the usual aspect of controlling the masses, but also because in Christian thought orthodoxy (’correct thought’) was core to the eternal fate of one’s soul - if everyone could interpret the scriptures for themselves, especially the uneducated (in Church theology), they might get it wrong and damn themselves - and others for all eternity. So for the Church, it was more a question of tradition/legitimacy ("If we admit to linguistic ambiguity, we undermine our claim to being the only source of truth") and maintaining theological unity ("We had a whole murderous schism over one letter in the Greek alphabet; let’s not repeat that") by limiting the number of people who were capable, in any real sense, of interpreting theology.

I would compare the Catholic use of Latin to the use of Old Church Slavonic in some Orthodox Churches or Hebrew in Rabbinical Judaism (maintaining a dead language to minimize schisms), or the use of Mongolian in the Mongol Empire (restricting texts and institutional communication from outsiders to privilege an ‘inner group’ who knows the language); whereas Ancient Rome insisting on Latin has more in common with English in the British Empire (cultural chauvinism + easier recruitment of locals for government and economic work), or even Arabic in the Muslim conquests (language of law and lingua franca, spread to as many as possible).

It’s particularly strange since in the Early Republic, women had the three names (all with feminine endings) which were distinctive of Roman citizens, and then at some point it became normalized to be just two names (both with feminine endings).

Admittedly, families usually restricted themselves to a ridiculously small number of praenomina, the name which women ‘lost’, and praenomina themselves were extremely limited, but it’s still very odd.

Funny enough, I’d argue there isn’t continuity there. Greek was the preferred language of the early Church, and, by that period, also the preferred language of civilian government in much of the Empire. Latin only maintained supremacy in the military by the late 4th century AD. The Catholic Church insisting on Latin instead of a vernacular (rather than Latin as the vernacular) was a later development.