this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
806 points (98.0% liked)
People Twitter
5230 readers
483 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a tweet or similar
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Most people don’t have a clue. I remember mentionning the word byzantine at the dinner table when I was a teenager and was told “you play too many games and read too many books, this is reality, there’s no such thing as a byzantine”.
When I showed them the wikipedia page about it, “it’s not because it’s on the internet that it’s true”. Yet here we are, in 2024, where they are glued to facebook believing some of the wildest things.
Yeah, I've noticed there's this weird cross-section of people who ask "do you believe everything you heard on the internet?" about some pretty established facts, and blindly believing Fox News.
It's a logical fallacy, aka a debate trick for stupid people. Appeal to authority (something can't be true unless it's said by someone with the authority to be right) plus a claim that source doesn't have the authority to be right. Another version of this is when someone acts like citations are proof (or a lack of citations is a disproof).
I mean, there was no such thing as a byzantine. That's a name we came up with in the modern era to help distinguish between "roman" empires.
To expand on that it was during the enlightenment in the early renaissance where people had a boner over the Roman Empire but still thought the medieval Roman Empire (Byzantine) to not be cool. So they came up with a new name for it. A declining empire that had a massive beauracracy, spoke Greek and had the wrong brand of Christianity (Orthodox) is not nice enough to create a glorious image like the Pax Romana did.
This of course made a lot of people upset in the then Ottoman empire since they identified as Romans but were not counted as Romans according to western people. Think "You're not Romans with a glorious history, you're Byzantines" even though they clearly were.
For extra fun the Byzantine/Roman distinction is also unfair.
Fuck their shit up by inventing systemic racism
Humans are pretty racist by default until they realise that everybody is actually also a human being. "Barbarian" is just a different word for "sub-human" that was used back then. Nowadays we use racial/ethnic/religious/housing status or whatever negative term that's out of the person's control to justify instead.
What's fun to me is that Barbarian literally means hairy, referring to cultures that didn't wear beards as superior
That's a common misconception. The word "barba" in Spanish and "barbaroi" in Greek have distinct origin of the gibberish "bar bar bar" which is apparently how all barbarian speak. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia page on barbarians under "Etymology".
Oh it's cute you think the Roman's invented that.
I didn't say they were the first!
There are plenty of cultures that developed systemic racism independently, I don't want to diminish their shittiness.
Also very curious considering that racism as we would recognize it doesn't have its seeds planted until the 15th century AD.
Too much treachery. Maybe if they stopped assassinating their rulers and managed their funds better by continuing to properly fund their military and continuing to pay off the tribes they could've lasted a bit longer.
It's so wild that they survived the Year of the 4 (and 5 and 6) Emperors when you think about it. The entire empire nearly collapses in the third century and what do they do to the man responsible for restoring it? They assassinate him. Or if it's not the emperor then it's the head of the military who had been responsible for holding off multiple tribes, negotiating with them and attempting to keep the city of Rome from being ransacked (unsuccessfully). And then you assassinate the emperor responsible and then the new emperor decides to provoke the biggest tribe of them all.
Maybe it was a good thing that the Roman Empire collapsed. I just wish it had happened before empowering a cult.
It was. There are no good empires.
Of course, instead of the Republic reforming you got a thousand years of warlords calling themselves kings, but that's how it goes when people listen to Popes.
Yeah, though I'm learning about Japan's history and, as much as I don't like how things went in European history, it could have been much worse.
Like one big moment for me was when I realized that the whole seppuku ritual thing was actually rational and intended to prevent an even worse outcome.
A European King (or church) could only kill so many people even with trials before unrest would start up. A Japanese Lord could just politely request subordinates kill themselves at their earliest convenience.
Well clearly the Earth is flat because here's a picture of some water reflecting off a puddle, and that totally proves it apparently.