Yuck, generally military history and military hardware interest are pretty major red flags to me. squints at news megathread that I regularly post on

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.

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

Often, because when I feel hopeless and that there is no justice in the world, I try to remember God enacted justice upon the Romans by turning them into Italians.

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)

this is me but for the USSR

Men only think about one thing and it’s fucking disgusting.

So how much is a normal amount to think about the Roman empire? Twice a week?

This is my second day in a row thinking about the Roman Empire because I’ve been prompted to by this meme.

They “think” about it all the time, but don’t know anything about it beyond vague trivia about battles and emperors

Age of Empires 2 just ported Age of Empires 1 as the latest expansion, don’t blame me for thinking about Roman legionary stats

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.

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I just listened to the Parenti talk about Caesar, ok? It’s not my fault.

i sometimes think about how daily life would have been, they had fast food places and advertisements

also the battle of Cannae

but not every day, the Soviet Union however

I, Claudius is my favorite book :(

I bet they love thinking about “greek boys” as well haha. A lot of German CHUDs are really into roman history, well tbf the “weird guy historian who loves rome” is a niche as well but you get my point.

I was an avid news watcher. Glad I got over that phase

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.

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.

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.

Does this include Columbo?

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)

They can’t be edgy and say le funnay joek at the expense of disadvantaged people anymore!*

*they can but look like assholes because they are assholes and only assholes will receive that well now.

I mean you can, it’s just we figured out it’s a bad idea.

I always reply in agreement then follow up about how imperial plundering of the global south has been increasing with the turbocharging of neoliberalism and all the criminal leaders and functionaries of the the US and its allies should be put in prison while letting everyone else out

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Bonus flags if they mention Chicago in this context.

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.

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?

My mom recently gasped when I told her I had taken a train once, years ago

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should be thrown into internet camps and gassed

Ah, the old game-and-gas routine

it’s honestly amazing how quick a lib will start to call for death camps when homelessness is mentioned. is it different in Europe? serious question, does the presence of some kind of real social safety net mean that people are less bloodthirsty to their neighbors just for being poor?

There’s really no way for liberals to win with this one because their wealth is predicated on rising property values—which naturally produces homeless people. If you even adopt the milquetoast liberal approach of constructing affordable housing, that lowers property values. If you just pretend the homeless people aren’t there, that lowers property values. So as a liberal, there’s really nothing you can do. Capitalism has fucked the planet for the last couple of centuries; now this monster, in its vicious hunger for ever-dwindling sources of profit, is finally coming for you, too. The death camp approach is also pointless (purely from an economic perspective) because rising property values will continue to produce homeless people, which will mean more tax money for death camps, which themselves will produce ever-larger numbers of radicalized people who will increasingly adopt violent and organized methods to oppose you, etc. The only way to deal with “the homeless problem” (actually the landlord problem) is to eliminate landlords and establish quality universal housing—which means that dwellings cease to be an investment and you, Mr. Liberal, have to actually get a real job and work for a change.

Being afraid of cities in general, especially if they live in a small town/rural area.

“B-b-b-but the fascist TV man told me cities are warzones full of minorities and the homeless! Everyone is constantly robbing each other and murdering at random! No I haven’t left my hometown of 2000 people in 15 years, why do you ask?”

I can’t tell you how many people I got this from when moving to Minneapolis

It just means I see fewer of those people around 🥳

Being afraid of Malmö is a similar kind of red flag.

I have every right to be scared of Chicago because I had a flight with a layover there last week and as soon as I walked off the airplane and into O’Hare airport Chief Keef ran up and shot me to death

“we’re nine missed meals from murdering each other in the streets”

When a chud says that, what they mean is they look forward to it.

we’re nine missed meals from murdering each other in the streets

Always love to walk through that logic. Why do hungry people have a higher likelihood of murdering each other? Is it 9 missed meals for an individual or does a group of people need to experience those missed meals collectively? How long can people get by on 2 meals a day without being murdered? How long can people get by on 1 meal a day without being murder? 1 meal every 2 days? What if they’re skipping meals but their kids are fed? If it takes 3 days to reach Murdertown, what happens on days 1 and 2? Is everyone dead on day 4? Are there particular people who tend to be targets of the murder? Is the murder for meat? Is it out of anger? Is a power play? How do you prepare for The Purge But For Real? What should we do to prevent it? What can we do? Why do you think about this so often? Do you think it’s imminent? Why why why why why

“how do you do fellow leftists? hey just so you know, i’m racist. hope that won’t be a problem”

On the first part shouldn’t the solution be making sure everyone has what they need to avoid people being in desperate straights? It seems more sensible to do this than try to beat everyone into submission

reject pizza slavery

embrace BMF thought

Is there any political group working specifically against tipping?

Questioning how much not eating somewhere actually moves the needle at all. If a restaurant goes out of business, it’s not necessarily clear that it’s because patrons opposed tipping culture. So for that reason, it seems that anti-tipping progress has to come from labor itself, by refusing to work for tips. But I also recognize that that’s not possible for many people barely scraping by.

“well I was beaten as a kid and I turned out fine”

• someone who manifestly did not turn out fine

That sounds like something the Union should act on since here deliberately differential conditions between union and non union shops slwould be something the Ombudsman would be quite interested in.

Particularly annoying since the entire 25th Dynasty of Egypt was actually black.

I don’t mean to disagree but

"Jesus was black

Ronald Reagan was the devil

and the government is lying about 9/11"

is a based take because Huey Freeman is probably the most based character in mainstream animation.

“im not religious im spiritual”

In my experience near the Bay Area, there’s enough spillover of Silicon Valley tech cult bullshit for “spiritual” to mean a number of terrible things from eugenics-fixated “Secular Calvinism” to prophecies of nerd rapture or escape from The Simulation™. And a lot of them have MLM-style grifts to sell you.

I dont eat gmos

I’m curious about your experience with people who say that. Its it anything other than the fact that the statement is fundamentally classist because buying GMO-free or non-processed foods is materially impossible for most working-class people?

I have pretty big criticisms to GMOs because I think their use has and will lead to the further precarization of food systems, the erasure of indigenous foodways and untold amounts of stress on soils and ecosystems. People who oppose GMOs on a “health” basis are a bit silly, in my opinion.

anyone who does keto

I always knew I was getting the wall, but i didn’t realise to would be so soon

(I did Keto with a pretty severe calorie deficit and lost 35kg, which I kept off for a year. I then went to America for a holiday/got married, got plantar fasciitis from social sport that stopped me from walking comfortably and COVID happened and I put 40kg back on lmao)

anyone who does keto

Oh fuck.

I did the version of keto where you just don’t eat bread or sugary food. I think it was adequately sloppy enough to prevent any chudification