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There’s a TikTok trend right now of women asking their male partners (or others) “How often do you think of the Roman Empire?” and a significant amount of them responding “often” or “all the time”.
Yuck, generally military history and military hardware interest are pretty major red flags to me. squints at news megathread that I regularly post on
It’s one of those hobbies where everyone’s a communist or a fash with very little in between
there’s a lot of liberal military nerds nowadays since the SMO, an interest in military history nowadays is more indicative of just having a strong political stance in general now more than being linked to a tendency.
I often think about the Roman Empire because their concrete had quicklime mixed with seawater, which resulted in a chemical reaction leaving patches of undissolved lime throughout the concrete. Therefore, when Roman concrete cracks, rainwater leaks in, hits the undissolved lime, which produces calcium carbonate crystals which fill in the gaps in the concrete as they form. It’s literally self-healing concrete!
This is the reason why Roman concrete is so ridiculously resilient that it can last for thousands of years, compared to the few decades that concrete made with modern techniques tends to last. However, after the recipe for Roman concrete was lost to time, it took us about as long to reverse engineer it: it was literally only earlier this year when scientists discovered that the undissolved lime chunks in Roman concrete were not a mistake or a result of bad technique, but 100% the intentional and ingenious key to the concrete’s longevity.
Cement production is currently a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and this could be greatly reduced by creating longer-lasting concrete with the recently rediscovered Roman method, or a derivative thereof.
…But chances are that most people who spend any significant amount of time thinking about the Roman Empire are not thinking about concrete, nor gender variant history, city planning, bathhouses and latrines, how the misspellings of vulgar graffiti are used to reconstruct the history of the Romance languages, how Catullus 16 was basically the spiritual predecessor to “Ram Ranch”, or all sorts of other genuinely interesting things about the wonders and woes of daily life thousands of years ago… But rather, most people will be thinking about sexy muscle men with spears and shields and racist fashy undertones.
Ancient people deserve better than that.
…But chances are that most people who spend any significant amount of time thinking about the Roman Empire are not thinking about concrete, nor gender variant history, city planning, bathhouses and latrines, how the misspellings of vulgar graffiti are used to reconstruct the history of the Romance languages, how Catullus 16 was basically the spiritual predecessor to “Ram Ranch”, or all sorts of other genuinely interesting things about the wonders and woes of daily life thousands of years ago… But rather, most people will be thinking about sexy muscle men with spears and shields and racist fashy undertones.
Ancient people deserve better than that.
A lot of popular historical period and period-inspired (various fantasy settings or whatever) fiction tend to revolve around wars and stuff. I think we need more works like Pentiment that tries to connect modern people to the human side of history. Humans in the past were still little weird people like we are today, they just had very different material conditions.
Portland cement and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
E: I do wanna push back on the “figured it out yesterday” part of the lime cement story though. Builders have known about lime for a long time but concrete is reenforced with steel nowadays. A lime/brine cement would eat through the steel reinforcement in a couple of decades and all those pretty modern cantilever things would fall over.
It wasn’t until recently that we had reinforced plastic rebar to use in the same type of constructions (refer to table 3h for revised tension ratings). That’s why the whole internet is lit up with articles about Roman concrete, because we finally have reinforcement materials to build more with it than a patio grill.
I’ve never heard of plastic rebar, that’s super interesting. i googled it and got “fiber-reinforced plastic,” is that what you’re talking about?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre-reinforced_plastic
Fibre-reinforced plastic (FRP; also called fibre-reinforced polymer, or in American English fiber) is a composite material made of a polymer matrix reinforced with fibres. The fibres are usually glass (in fibreglass), carbon (in carbon-fibre-reinforced polymer), aramid, or basalt. Rarely, other fibres such as paper, wood, boron, or asbestos have been used. The polymer is usually an epoxy, vinyl ester, or polyester thermosetting plastic, though phenol formaldehyde resins are still in use.
FRPs are commonly used in the aerospace, automotive, marine, and construction industries. They are commonly found in ballistic armour and cylinders for self-contained breathing apparatuses.
i watched that animation of the process of roman road building and it stuck with me. i think i was playing valheim a lot at the time and i wanted to make some intense causeway lol, but i’ve also taken courses in and helped install a small variety of hardscapes in backyards and small agricultural settings. earthworks and other “built environment” design for supporting human activity is super interesting to me.
i often think about the logistics, materials, and processes of the ancient/pre-modern world. my justification is that the world before the dependency of fossil fuels still has lessons for us, from an engineering and design perspective.
i am not so interested in the philosophy and value system of that era, which i think is the distinction. people who are obsessed with the imagery and pageantry are probably harboring fash tendencies.
My SO found that TikTok and texted it to me and I texted back 200 words about the organization and composition of the Roman Republic’s manipular armies
I just played a lot of Rome Total War in 2008 but it was pretty funny
Haha I answered “not much, I usually focus more on the late Republic and how the illegal expansion of patrician slave estates mirrors the enclosure of the commons in England” and my partner counted that as “I think about the Roman empire a lot”
So how much is a normal amount to think about the Roman empire? Twice a week?
IDK for me I’m too busy thinking about global socialism (part present and future) and the Roman empire is mostly irrelevant to that.
If you’re thinking about fascism a lot it quickly becomes more relevant I’d have to assume, or moderately relevant to liberals but they don’t care as much about history in general.
Not meant to be a dig at you in not the thought police haha
I often think of the Roman Empire and other associated European history because of how much of it informs our current Anglo world-views, but it also demonstrates the differences in the current imperial set-up and how these differences may inform the signs of collapse. To be fair, I spend a lot of time thinking about empires and societies across the world.
Nothing is ever one-to-one but there are always strange similarities, but a lot of these similarities come from the interpretation of historians who are placing their own modern anxieties onto attitudes of the past (or even more common, us interpreting ancient historians who are interpreting history through the anxieties of their own time). Finding what is real, and what is imagined is likely the most difficult task in the world.
It’s amazing how much we think we know, and yet how little we do. The past is truely a strange country.
Anybody that watches any news on tv cannot be saved. They will never understand anything that happens on this planet.
I’m surrounded by people who watch local news, which is 99% “a criminal did something bad…but then our plucky boys in blue CAUGHT HIM!” It’s not enough that every other movie or TV show is about cops (or superheroes or cowboys or people in the space navy, who are all also cops). CNN / MSNBC / Fox News would honestly be an upgrade for people who still consume local news.
More often its, ‘a criminal did something bad… we haven’t caught him yet, so stay extremely vigilant, 100% of the time; you could be the one that finds him!’ So people create the fantasy of being a vigilante and install security cameras all around their house in the suburbs.
A few months ago I tried watching NRK news on the TV. There was some interesting stuff, but there was also a lot of stuff where I said, “…Why exactly are you showing me this? I don’t think you’re telling the whole story here, anyways.”
TV news can be a good way to hear about recent events, but it isn’t always a good way to be informed about them. This is true anywhere, but especially in the United Occupation Zones of America — where the TV news is among the world’s most laughably bad, and most of the residents don’t even realize its quality.
I have moved several times in my life. Local news is a good way to understand the dominant mindset and priorities of an area; annual festivals, long-standing family restaurants, concerts happening. Stuff like that is what the local news should be for. Too bad it’s sprinkled in with the crime and politics segments which keep people “excited” to watch the news.
Anything positive at all about any type of cop, anything negative at all about any homeless person.
One day in the near future, there will be a homeless cop and any time anyone says anything about them they will become a corncob instantly.
No one is ever a “cop something”, they’re always a “something cop” (well mostly just because that’s the way job titles work but you know).
Just imagining another cop brutalizing the homeless cop, but then they both cover it up
When anyone says “these days you can’t-” in regards to anything progressive
i just flip it immediately and stun them into silence
“I know, you can’t even kill landlords anymore. Political correctness gone mad”
(as much as this sounds like a “and then everyone clapped and the lecturer was Albert Einstein” scenario, I said this out loud at a pub and got at least 5 reactions. At least some of my friends laughed)
When we had office debates / arguments about the government wanting to digitally spy on all citizens. The chuds that think “terrorists bad, so government spying good” always used to make the “nothing to hide? Nothing to fear” argument. I’d always do like you said and play along. “Yeah dude, anyway pass me your phone?” “Why?” “I want to read your texts and go through your photos” “Fuck off” “What’s the matter? Nothing to hide? Nothing to fear”. They never made that argument again.
Thinking crime has gotten worse, it’s an absolute TV talking point that everyone repeats nowadays. If you try to bring up empirical evidence of crime decreasing every decade they just respond with some anecdotal bullshit they probably made up. It infuriates me and I wanna shout their face, “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
Bonus points if they do this while living in Chicago or surrounding areas
This is a red flag, but I’d say it’s probably 50/50 on whether someone will dig in when confronted with the reality of the situation vs. listen.
The big issue is getting people to not just listen and nod along, but remember that next time they see a crime story instead of defaulting back to the media narrative.
Both the Conservative CSU and the fascist AfD are running “tough on crime” campaigns here… bruh, even in bigger cities like Nürnberg or München you could leave the door open all day and odds are nothing would happen to your stuff. It’s entirely “young men speaking arabic on the streets - this is very scary!” based, even if this overt forms of scaremongering have passed onto more subtle ones.
Bavaria has like 5 cops per resident, wtf are these people going on about?
every day my fucking coworker tells everyone about some new violent crime that happened somewhere in the greater metro area because he has an app on his phone that apparently gives push notifications for this stuff. i’m thinkin like “dude why do you have that you are driving yourself insane”
yes he’s a homeowner who commutes from the suburbs, how could you tell?
