Ma worked for the CIA from 1982 to 1989. He was accused of conspiring with a relative, who had also worked for the agency, to deliver “a large volume” of national defense information to Chinese spies in exchange for $50,000 in 2001.

Damn, national secrets go for cheap.

It’s a bluff, essentially (ironically?).

Don’t worry - I watched the whole first episode of that same documentary thing on Netflix and it just went downhill from there. You didn’t miss anything good.

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men.

Aurelius must have had a meeting with Trump.

Chuds: “YES ROME SO MANLY PURE TESTOSTORONE”

Romans: “Too tall? Barbarian. Too much meat? Barbarian. Dick too big? Barbarian. Too aggressive? Barbarian. No self-control? Barbarian. Too much sex? Barbarian.”

“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.” - Emperor Claudius (as quoted by Tacitus)

Ah, experiencing man-flu is now a universal experience between cis and trans men. Come, brothers, let us be miserable together

I suspect it’s a bad choice in the long run, but hopefully Morena can get some good out of it at least currently.

No, no, I enjoy discussing such things!

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations were not released during his lifetime - they were his, well, private meditations. It wasn’t a call for the citizens of the Empire to be obedient - there is a fascinating tradition of Emperors doing that, but it uses very different phrasing and is typically divorced from the Greek philosophical tradition that Aurelius drew upon when writing the Meditations. You find many other Emperors exhorting the citizenry to be dutiful and loyal to the Roman state, but Aurelius and Julian the Apostate are the only ones with serious philosophical inclinations that they express in their writings. I don’t think it’s too bizarre to think that, out of some 500 years of rulers, two were genuinely interested in and proficient with philosophy.

You drive a hard bargain.

Explanation: The Roman Empire had two prominent ‘successors’ after it fell - the Holy Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire was a continuation in name only - it was formed over 300 years after the fall of Rome, had no continuation of Roman institutions, and had its only real link in the approval of the Pope - who, in turn, only sought to legitimize the polity because the Byzantine Empire was being run by a woman at the time, and because the Byzantines didn’t recognize the Pope’s ultimate spiritual authority.

The Byzantine Empire was a continuation in more than name - the term ‘Byzantine’ is only a term of modern convenience. The Byzantines regarded themselves as simply the Roman Empire - ‘Basileía Romaíon’ (‘The Roman Kingdom’). But even though there was technically unbroken continuity from the Eastern Roman Empire of Late Antiquity, the Byzantines had very little in common with the Roman Empire of old - regarding their rulers as monarchs, Latin as a ‘barbarian tongue’, Christianity as the main identifier of ‘Romanness’, violation of traditional Roman norms, and controlling only the old Greek portions of the former Roman Empire. In the European West, they were simply known as the Kingdom or Empire of the Greeks.

I only recognize ONE brutal pre-modern Imperial autocracy, and that is the Roman Empire of antiquity!

I should be rulecified for such an oversight

i wasnt trying to romanticize the era of hunter gatherers, but while rome might have been quite moderate at that time, practically everyone else were already patriachial to a point where most women would be second class citizens with little economic freedom, or economically free but sworn to celibacy, and their profits would return to their fathers

Many Celtic and Germanic tribes were still relatively gender-egalitarian (moreso than Rome, in many cases), as were many Berber and Arab tribes of the period, and Nubian/Ethiopian kingdoms, India, and the Scythians of Central Asia.

They were mostly still patriarchal, but less patriarchal than the European and Islamic civilizations that would later emerge where we get our ‘clearest’ view of Patriarchy from.

i mean, i dont know exactly what he had in mind when writing that, but, like, there are only so many things that concern an emperors mind.

It’s an excerpt from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Aurelius was a philosopher in addition to an Emperor, and his writings are excellent-but-pretty-orthodox expressions of Stoic doctrine of the time.

The big three surviving philosophical schools of the time all had a very “Look inwards” worldview - Stoicism claiming that we decide ourselves how the outside world pains or does not pain us; Epicureans claiming that it is by learning to appreciate the simple pleasures of life that one achieves contentment with life; and Cynics claiming that mankind is happiest in a state of nature, and that the constructs of human society are window dressing at best - as such, one should act according to one’s ‘gut’ in any given situation.

perhaps rome at aurelius’ time was a wee bit more moderate, but i would not expect that to stay true farther away from the capital.

There were actually drastic changes between Constantine and Marcus Aurelius. The Empire effectively fell apart in the 3rd century AD, and was cobbled back together by warlords. By the time of Constantine, between changing norms and the weakening of Rome’s (and Italy’s) position as central to the Empire led to Constantine being able to push through changes like turning “Death penalty for anyone raping a freeborn person” to “Any woman who is raped is put to death if she doesn’t scream loud enough” (itself a violation of one of the oldest norms of Roman society regarding rape which dates back to the founding of the Republic). Christian values!

The provinces of the 1st and 2nd century AD were still heavily influenced by traditional Roman values, especially in the Western half of the Empire. And some of those provinces were more female-friendly than Roman traditions were. We have evidence of Roman businesswomen acting in their own names as far east as Syria and as far west as Britain.

thank you for your time writing all this, it was very interesting.

Anytime! Rome is a personal obsession of mine, lol.

perhaps i can interest you in the book that triggered my response in the first place? it tries to shine a light on what happened to drive men away from women, i.e. how the patriarchy came to be (probably) the english title is “the good book of human nature” … the mind boggles as to why the author shies away from just calling it “the truth about eva” which would be the direct translation from german, i can only assume it’s to not cause to big an upheaval among religious folks…

I’ve not heard of that book in particular, but I’ve read numerous articles in academic journals about how patriarchy arose in various societies. Ugly stuff.

While Roman society was MUCH more sexist than anything we would regard as acceptable in modern society, women had many rights at the height of the Roman Empire that later European societies would not keep. The right of women to own property was so strict that gifts from a wife to a husband were not legally recognized - if they divorced, claims that any property of the wife was a gift to her husband would not be recognized, and would be returned to the newly-divorced wife. Women often held significant amounts of property and ran businesses in their own name, and there is ample evidence for women as independent workers in skilled and semiskilled professions.

There is considerable writing at the time discussing the role of women in society, and while the opinions of Roman men are very far from ‘enlightened’, they also quite clearly regard women as more than breeding stock. The Roman author Musonius Rufus even advocated for women to be trained in the arts of war, and posited than any job a man could do, a woman could do also.

Women could divorce their husbands without need for any deeper cause beyond “I don’t want to stay in this marriage anymore”, and domestic abuse within marriage was grounds for civil lawsuits. All rape of freeborn persons (within the context of Roman governance; foreigners being conquered were less lucky) was subject to the death penalty. Bloodline descent (‘breeding stock’) was considered much less important, as Romans placed a higher value on a cultural/loyalty familial system in which adoption was widely accepted and direct descent was less important (though not nil) to being recognized as part of the descendants of the family. The idea of ‘securing the throne’ was not really applicable until later in Roman society when the norms of the city of Rome began to be eroded in favor of a more ‘cosmopolitan’ and universal imperial culture.

/Romaboo moment over

Authoritarian/Libertarian and Economic Left-Right

It’s the Political Compass, just a horoscope for political junkies. Great for making jokes like “The most libertarian position you can take is anprim” and “Centrists are uninterested in anything except grilling” though

It’s so fucking obvious is it that these people are paid by the meat industry.

I disagree. I think many of them are legitimately just that stupid.

Although some probably are paid.

He looks intense as fuck. The cat looks like they’d open the door high on catnip and invite you in for a glass of milk when you were just there to drop off the mail.

What do the X and Y Axis represent?