#History discourse

[eurydiceauxenfers]

I know we all love the Ides of March here and I know how very cathartic it would be if our own current wannabe dictator experienced some serious deja vu. I get that most of you are not being serious here when you say you want an Ides of March repeat, but for those who are, let me seriously explain something to you.

Caesar’s assassination did not save the Roman Republic, it was its final death blow. Do you know what happened immediately after the Stabbening?

Caesar’s supporters turned him into a martyr and whipped his populist power base into a violent bloody mob. The second Triumvirate enacted a bloody war and purge against Caesar’s enemies before turning on each other like Cadmus’ dragon teeth warriors, until eventually Octavian emerged on top and officially ended the Republic. And throughout it all, the common man suffered.

I’d also like to remind you that the men who stabbed Caesar were not protecting our Enlightenment inspired Democratic Republic. They were protecting Roman Republicanism. They were not rebels, they were wealthy, elite men, fighting to preserve their own power base and wealth. Ultimately the entire downfall of the Republic was centered on one issue: land reform. The elites of Rome sought to forcibly buy out land from yeoman farmers and consolidate it into large villas, forcing the previous owners out into poverty to be replaced with cheap slave labor. Populists like Caesar fought to enact land reforms to protect the small farmers. He also funded a lot of public infrastructure and welfare projects as well as the arts.

Caesar was more of a “leftist” (whatever the fuck that even means for someone who lived thousands of years before the development of feudalism let alone capitalism and socialism) than the men who stabbed him. He was also a dictator and tyrant, unbelievably corrupt and a callous ruthless opportunist to his core (not to mention, like all Romans, a genocidal, colonizing racist). The Ides of March is not a guide, it’s a cautionary tale.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

Happy annual Dracula Paprika Discourse Day to those who celebrate!

[revans-rubber-duckie]

Bestie....

The Eastern Roman Empire is not the Holy Roman Empire. Objectively, the HRE was made in retaliation to the ERE depending on when you want to consider it's formation. In either case, it was named for a distinction from the Empire of Constantinople.

Constantine did not make Christianity the state religion. He only legalised it. He also did not officially convert until his death bed (which admittedly probably has more to do with absolution of all sin at baptism than it does his actual beliefs but who's to say) so take that as you will. He was no more a warmonger than any other emperor at the time. The high "pagan" numbers is probably because Christianity was a minority and recently persecuted faith. And also the official state religion was still that of the Romans pantheon. Also he originally named it New Rome. It took a minute for him to rename it again. On a side note, he's from the fourth century.

The lack of Christian population may or may not be because of the three days of slaughter following Constantinople'e fall. Or perhaps the population exchanges where the remaining Christian subjects were exchanged for Muslim. Or, perhaps, even, the genocide by the Ottoman Empire and the treatment of non-Muslim subjects during its ~300 year rule of the area.

If one were to open any history book and look up Byzantine Empire/Eastern Roman Empire in the 15th century, prior to the fall of Constantinople, they would learn it was an Empire in name only and was steadily declining. There was nothing oppressive about it. It was barely holding on.

And I don't know how to break this to you, but Istanbul is just Constantinople* in a Turkish accent.

*It's the Turkish form of the colloquial Greek meaning "to the city," which is what majority of the Greek speaking population called it.

I’m going to Constantinople, that shit better not be Istanbul

[autistic-harley-quinn]

T/R/Fs love to perpetuate the myth that Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick at stonewall (debunked by Marsha herself) and act like trans women were the only ones doing anything at stonewall while conviently forgetting it was a transmasc person at the center of the inciting incident.

[otto-bot]

So, just for reference, you believe that the civilian centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserved to be enveloped in atomic hellfire due to the Japanese government? Do you also believe the US made a mistake in not glassing Tokyo as well?

No absolutely not. No civilians ever deserve to die because of their government. What I said was that any of the alternatives to force Japan’s surrender (blockading, firebombing, invasion, or any mix of the three) would, and I say this with 100% certainty, result in more civilian casualties than the atomic bombings caused, both from the immediate explosion and after effects like radiation poisoning and homelessness.

If there was a way to have forced Japan’s unconditional surrender without the use of the atomic bombs, I would be criticizing the US for not doing it, but sadly there wasn’t.

[pieisnotreal]

The way historyblr discourse went from "was historical figure gay or bi?" To "don't try to shoehorn ancient people's into modern definitions of sexuality" to "don't you dare call this person gay of I head you Say Gay I'm gonna piss in your shoes we avoid that talk here" is concerning

[trans-exchange]

10 Most Damaging Myths about Transmen and FTMs

All FTMs come from the lesbian community, and after transition are heterosexual. (that is, attracted to women)

Transsexualism/transgenderism can be "cured" by psychotherapy. Transsexual men are really just lesbians.

FTMs did not exist until after World War II,with the advent of hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery.

Female-to-Males are far rarer than Male-to-Female transsexuals.

Transmen seek to live as and be recognized as male in order to obtain male privilege and economic advantages.

All transmen exhibit stereotypically male behavior and want to be as macho as possible.

Taking testosterone makes Female-to-Male transsexuals much more aggressive and angry than they were before taking hormones.

All FTMs want genital reconstruction as the driving force of their transition. (not necessarily the social aspects that go along with masculinity)

Historically, all women only chose to live as men to pursue careers that were otherwise unattainable to them, to seek economic opportunities, or to justify lesbian relationships.

Transmen are really just butch lesbians who change sex

[rideroftherange]

Those Scythian girls will drive a man to madness.

As we watch Elon Musk become Emperor of Mankind despite the excruciating preponderance of evidence that he is the most cringing and pathetic insect on this wretched planet I am wondering what kind of insecure cloying piece of shit Alexander the Great must have been

[clearwingedmaven]

Alright, so. I've got little time and some ideas, so I'll do a brief thought process on the death of Sherlock Holmes in 1893, and the fandom as a whole.

Firstly, getting this out of the way. Sherlock Holmes was not the first modern fandom. That honor most likely goes to Charles Dickens and his work, especially the Pickwick Papers. There is evidence and record that fan merchandise, like joke books, tobacco, and shoe horns, were made with Pickwick Papers characters, especially Sam Weller.

However, Sherlock Holmes is probably our first instance of a global fandom where consequences quite literally created a literary and cultural firestorm. This isn't an exaggeration.

ACD's relationship with Holmes is... strange. Of course, he wanted to kill off Holmes, and move onto other books. (Historical novels, mainly, or Spiritualist manifesto), but there was always a love hate relationship, and we see that most predominantly through fan letters.

Almost immediately after Holmes’s death in 1893, there was shock. Scandal. Mourning. Fans exchanged letters in newspapers, trying to reach out to other fans to figure out what just happened, and what to do next. Holmes was dead. And for all anyone knew, so was the series.

So how'd they cope?

By creating communities. Discourse communities, to be more apt. They exchanged letters, asked questions, and talked through newspapers. Each one plucked from 1893 and 1894 show grief and confusion: for a fictional character.

People even started seeking out Joseph Bell, the man who inspired Holmes, in order to try to fill the void. There's even record of fans venturing to Reichenbach Falls in costume to pay tribute to their fallen hero. And this kept happening. For years. The world lost not just a character, it was their friend.

Keep in mind! Victorian literature was a family affair. Many people would gather around and read stories and books together, so the firestorm went further.

Until, it made ACD change his mind, and bring back Sherlock Holmes. (Can we call it bullying? Perhaps. I call it a unique circumstance of cultural phenomena.)

So where does it leave the fandom?

Ah, that's the question. This fandom, uniquely, has a distinct honor of being one of the oldest living discourse communities, an exchange of reader response, engagement, and including even more material.

So to the fans: from the fanfic writers, to the game makers, to the cosplayers, to the fans of adaptations near and far, to the editors, to the artists, to the dreamers and thinkers...

It is, given the nature of the fandom, that you are all a part of history, as part of one of the oldest(and still going!) Fandom discourse communities.

Keep that in mind. And keep going. 🙂

[rideroftherange]

And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.

And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.

This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.

Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.

Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.

Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.

https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/

[anqueerism]

I think it's about time that we put away the "chewsday" and "bo'ol o' wa'ah" jokes.

It's frankly quite an overused and tired joke, but not only that, it's incredibly classist.

In the UK, accents are and always have been very heavily entwined with the country's class system. There is an extremely long and storied history of certain accents (such as the popularly-mocked cockney) being brutally ridiculed, suppressed in the public sector, and even banned from media and broadcasting while others like RP were promoted and even required.

This has lessened over time, but it still holds pretty true: Your accent is one of the main indicators of your class and your breeding, and will directly impact the way that people treat you.

These are historically marginalised and oppressed accents in the UK, so when you mock them— especially as someone who does not live in the UK— you are, in fact, directly mocking those people to whom the accent belongs.

Personally, I have a very sensitive history surrounding my accent. I was born into a working-class family, but my father was a social climber and intensely embarrassed about his own status. Because of this, he had an intense fixation with ensuring that I fit every classist mould of an upper-class child. I was heavily abused by my teachers as a child into speaking in a Received Pronunciation accent (which they regarded as the "proper" way to speak), and was physically beaten into learning to write in an "educated style."

It took me until I was about sixteen or seventeen to even begin feeling comfortable to speak in my natural accent in the comfort of my own home. When in groups or in front of crowds, I still revert to a softer RP accent. I still have chronic pain in my hands from the beatings I received, and I still refuse to write on paper because it causes PTSD flashbacks.

All this to say: As an American, or generally anyone from outside of the UK, you do not have the right to mock historically marginalised British accents. It is not funny. You are pressing on a bruise that is not yours to press on, and then mocking people when they tell you that you pressing on that bruise hurts.

If you want to mock an English accent, mock RP. Traditional, Broadcasting, Aristocratic, or Modern. Those are historically upper-class accents, which (for most people) have no heavy history attached to them. I would say it's fair game.

But when you mock the accents of the poor working class who have been unequivocally brutalised in this country for centuries and then go on to mock us when we try to tell you why we don't like you doing it, you just sound like a complete and utter asshole.

[chaotic-history]

"The male-male relationships that these 18th-century men desired did not use passionate heterosexual love as their model or language, but instead a masculine relationship of friendship, in which sexual desire was included." - Michel Rey, 1700-1750, Les sodomites créent une mode de vie

FUCKING THANK YOU.

[dedusmuln]

yeah you support trans people but are you normal about trans men who choose to get pregnant

[adhdevankinard]

Even if the writers bring in a new LI for Buck, no one is ever gonna beat Tommy Kinard. Sorry! But just look at this material:

Tommy personally knows and respects the life of a firefighter and why it’s so important to Buck, something that Buck’s previous love interests found difficult to understand

Tommy can be involved in calls and can help the 118 in a way others can’t (as we’ve seen)

Even before dating Buck, Tommy had strong connections to the main characters — the most important people in Buck’s life

Buck himself said Tommy is his most transformative relationship since Abby (whom Tommy is also connected to)

Speaking of Abby, Buck pined for her, but it was clear that Abby was ready to move on when she left him. With Buck and Tommy, both of them want each other back. Neither is ready to move on. They pine for each other.

Tommy is one of the very few people who call Buck “Evan” and the only one to do so regularly and with such affection. It was only during the breakup that Tommy called him Buck. The worst day of Buck’s life was the day Tommy called him by the name everyone else uses for him. Because Tommy isn’t everyone else. And no one else will ever be Tommy to Evan.

Tommy was a part of the call that ended with Bobby’s death. Tommy was the only one who saw Buck’s grief after losing the person he considered his father. Tommy was a pall bearer and walked with the main characters at Bobby’s funeral.

Speaking of Bobby, Tommy is the only LI of Buck’s that Bobby approved of. The only one Bobby will ever approve of. Bobby knew Tommy and Tommy knew Bobby. Tommy was part of the 118 when Bobby began again. Tommy saved Bobby’s life before Buck met him.

It was Tommy’s decision to transfer that opened the spot at the 118 that changed Buck’s life.

Literally, Buck is the happiest he has ever been when he is with Tommy. He can be giggly during sex and hold funerals for dead cowboys. Buck smiles and looks at Tommy with so much affection. And Tommy shows up for Buck – whether it’s attending the hospital wedding after an exhausting shift or making sure he’s resting after he’s injured or cooking him a literal feast or stealing a helicopter.

Any LI after Tommy would pale in comparison. The writers will do what they will but … why even attempt to outdo this ... You simply can’t!

[hmstartnell]

I’m gonna put you guys onto something because I’ve seen a lot of talk about this recently

this is an online course with the University of Alberta about Indigenous Canada. it’s completely free and I’m pretty sure you can do it from anywhere in the world. and honestly, I think it’s a great starting point. I finished it a couple of weeks ago and it really opened my eyes. like I didn’t realise how little I knew about their histories and cultures and how deeply they were (and still are) affected by the actions of European traders and settlers

Highly recommend to everyone who’s interested