For me the easiest tell is the up front, unprompted, and unsolicited declaration of nonpoliticalness. When someone takes the time and expends the breath to announce how nonpolitical they are, what follows is almost always a rant about how everything/everyone else is too political these days, and that of course leads into something between status quo advocacy and outright reactionary/regressive sentiments for some fabled time before those wicked politics were visible to the nonpolitical ranter.
People that are hostile to service workers. Some just want to take some ideological stand against tipping when the service worker doesn’t really have a choice and needs those tips to survive in the current unjust system in a way where ideological purity gestures toward that service worker just look like being a greedy and sanctimonious asshole. The worst of such people will actually declare, shamelessly, that they believe that service workers don’t deserve a living wage. The implications of that are worthy.
I may get shit for this, but I’ll say it anyway: this hair and beard combo, seen on living people. I have yet to meet anyone in person with that look that wasn’t a chud.
(If one of you is a comrade with that look, I am sorry in advance for the prejudice and if I ever meet you in person I will atone by buying you a drink or something.)
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.
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 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.
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.
i am not so interested in the philosophy and value system of that era
I think that stuff is important for understanding and contextualizing the events and conditions of those eras, so it’s worth studying from that perspective. The guys who are like “Meditations contains all of the wisdom you need in life” are losers of the highest order though.
…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.
There’s actually highly detailed trans shit that the Roman empire wrote down so I think about the 1 billion or so trans people that came before me and what their lives were like 🤔
(And yes that number is accurate assuming transness is . 7%-1% of the pop at any given time)
I think about the parallels between the fall of the roman empire and the declining state of the US hegemony on occasion (in a @Erika3sis mentioned about the concrete because that’s very cool, but I really only “think about the roman empire” in the way the question is asking when some nutsack with a marble statue avi says something inane, and then it’s just with irritation
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.
