#bret devereaux

[heroineimages]

A few days late to this debate, but I think part of the reason satirical depictions of fascism, especially in sci-fi settings, often struggle and are adopted by fascists is they tend to make the fascists good at war, a thing fascists value, but were historically rubbish at.

---Bret Devereaux

I love reading Bret's Twitter comments off to the side on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.

[st-just]

This isn’t because they are ‘lazy’ – the ‘lazy peasant’ (or poor worker generally) is a standard hypocrisy of the literature of the leisured aristocratic class towards poor farmers, today and in the past – but because they have priorities which are simply not served by labor maximization. For these families, the marginal value of working harder to produce a little bit more which they cannot eat and will likely be taken from them anyway is minimal; they focus on the goals they have. Why should these peasants break their backs so that leisured aristocrats can have more economic activity to tax? Remember: these people were poor, not stupid.

-Bret Devereaux, Bread: How Did They Make It?

[thefirstempress]

I swear every time I peruse Bret's blog, I find at least one entry that I either wish I'd had as a resource years ago or that's pertinent to something I'm currently working on.

[mycatwantstoeatpins]

I have no interest in seeing Gladiator II but I am enjoying Bret Devereaux's posts about it. Some excerpts (emphasis in original):

Gladiator II is explicitly set during the joint reign of Geta and Caracalla, two emperors of the Severan dynasty, but the film’s depictions of the two emperors is unrecognizable, [...] [H]ow does the film opt to portray Caracalla? Well, both of the emperors were cast as pale white young men with red hair; makeup is used to give their faces a sickly sort of color, with deep bags under their eyes. They’re presented in the film as chaotic, with Caracalla in particular being an effectively insane syphilitic (treating his pet monkey as a senator), and also queer-coded, shown with a decadent entourage of both men and women, wearing lots of jewelry (something only women and villains do in this film) and generally being fairly ‘camp.’ [...] – in contrast to the heroes Acacius and Lucius who are both explicitly straight and married to women. Indeed, even Lucius’ closest ally in the gladiator school, the former gladiator Ravi, stops to make sure we’re aware that he’s married to a woman. [...] Caracalla’s father was Septimius Severus, a man of North African extraction who claimed both Libyan and Punic ancestors. Caracalla’s mother, Julia Domna, was a Syrian woman, from an Arab family born in what today would be Homs, Syria (then Emesa). [...] [I]n the film, both Geta and Caracalla are the sort of emperors who send their generals – the fictional Marcus Acacius played by Pedro Pascal – to fight their ways, while they remain at Rome in luxury, far from any sort of violence. Indeed, this is an essential thematic contrast in the film: Rome’s failure and decadence are represented by the queer-coded, effiminate ‘soft’ men of the city and politics – Geta, Caracalla, Macrinus, Senator Thraex – while its vitality is represented by the hard men of violence – Acacius and Lucius. [...] Except the real Caracalla was exactly the sort of Roman that Ridley Scott pines for and he was a terrible emperor as a result. [...] Far from being a luxuriant, decadent, effeminate and insane figure – as Scott has him – the real Caracalla was perfectly sane. Paranoid, vengeful and violent, but absolutely in touch with reality. He is exactly the sort of man of violence these films glorify. And as a result he was a bad emperor! Caracalla’s lavish payments to the soldiers (he raised their pay substantially) and frequent campaigns (also expensive) drained the Roman treasury, while his reign reinforced the damaging precedent that the emperor was, for the most part, simply a soldier and a general. The problem with that is that if the emperor is just a general, then any general could be emperor and starting in 235, a non-trivial portion of Roman generals would try it, causing the Crisis of the Third Century. [...] For one, the film’s juxtaposition between the burly men of violence like Acacius and the weak, decadent senators is silly on its face. Indeed, Scott relies in both Gladiator films on a contrast between the career military men (Maximus, Acacius) and the political, senatorial elite. In Rome, these were the same men. To be a legatus Augusti pro praetore and to have a provincial command and a large army, one had to be a senator who had at least reached the praetorship. Not every senator was a general but every Roman general was a senator. Acacius’ claim in Gladiator II to not be “an orator or a politician” but merely a soldier and a general is a nonsense claim: at Rome, one could not be a general without being an orator and a politician. And while the film errs in suggesting that Roman collapse is just around the corner in 211 – when in fact we are close to the height of the empire and serious fragmentation is two centuries away – the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284) is coming. But the Crisis of the Third Century isn’t caused by a shortage of burly men in armor doing violence, but a surplus of them.

[nerianasims]

But war, war is something fascists value intensely because the beating heart of fascist ideology is a desire to prove heroic masculinity in the crucible of violent conflict (arising out of deep insecurity, generally). Or as Eco puts it, “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but, rather, life is lived for struggle…life is permanent warfare” and as a result, “everyone is educated to become a hero.” Being good at war is fundamentally central to fascism in nearly all of its forms – indeed, I’d argue nothing is so central. Consequently, there is real value in showing that fascism is, in fact, bad at war, which it is...

And the most fundamental strategic objective of every state or polity is to survive, so the failure to ensure that basic outcome is a severe failure indeed.

Judged by that metric, fascist governments are terrible at war. There haven’t been all that many fascist governments, historically speaking and a shocking percentage of them started wars of choice which resulted in the absolute destruction of their regime and state, the worst possible strategic outcome. Most long-standing states have been to war many times, winning sometimes and losing sometimes, but generally able to preserve the existence of their state even in defeat. At this basic task, however, fascist states usually fail...

Fascist governments, as Eco notes, “are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.” Fascism’s cult of machismo also tends to be a poor fit for modern, industrialized and mechanized war, while fascism’s disdain for the intellectual is a poor fit for sound strategic thinking. Put bluntly, fascism is a loser’s ideology, a smothering emotional safety blanket for deeply insecure and broken people (mostly men), which only makes their problems worse until it destroys them and everyone around them...

Fascism – and indeed, authoritarianisms of all kinds – are ideologies which fail to deliver the things a wise, sane people love – liberty, prosperity, stability and peace – but they also fail to deliver the things they promise.

These are loser ideologies. For losers. Like a drunk fumbling with a loaded pistol, they would be humiliatingly comical if they weren’t also dangerous. And they’re bad at war.

[space-wizards]

Bret Deveraux, summarizing the various ways Sparta sucked ass. Convenient!

[confusedbyinterface]

The fact that Cleopatra stays for a month after Caesar’s death suggests to me that she hoped to get Caesarion recognized as Caesar’s heir, which in turn suggests that Cleopatra had a poor grasp of Roman law and politics, both not realizing that her mere presence was a liability to the one person she needed to succeed (and not be stabbed 23 times) and also that the quest to get Rome to acknowledge Caesarion as Caesar’s heir was almost certainly hopeless. Caesarion could not be Caesar’s heir; as a non-citizen Caesarion wasn’t even a valid target as primary heir of Caesar’s will and so the chances of getting him recognized as Caesar’s heir through a Roman court was basically nil. In any case, Caesar’s will made Octavian his sole heir, which is a twist Cleopatra really ought to have seen coming since Caesar was openly preparing the fellow and planning to bring him along on his next campaign. Personally, I suspect Caesar always knew Caesarion wouldn’t be acceptable in Rome and never had any intention of making him his heir; that Cleopatra doesn’t seem to have known this is a striking indictment of her political acumen. And if you are thinking, “but wait, Antonius later seems to think he might be able to sell this at Rome” – yes, he might well have. He was also a lot less politically astute than Caesar.

Devereaux wouldn't say "Famous himbo Marcus Antonius" but I'm certainly thinking it

[brutish-impulse]

I'm reading a blog called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" so I really can't complain, but if the Mass Effect armor looks as if it's articulated, the designers probably don't want us to think that it's one rigid plate from the chest down to the groin, Bret!

Even if the plates aren't smooth enough to slide over each other. And the animation is cheating and has the plates bend instead of slide. Fully animated plate armor in a game would be cool, but I don't know how expensive that would be.

Point taken that the pauldrons aren't even trying to protect the shoulders from above, and the chest plate doesn't know if it wants to be a cuirass or a bulletproof vest.

(The actual historical part of the post about why real armor is designed the way it is is very interesting though.)

[stainlesssteellocust]

Types of Guy you will find on Sbee and Svee, an incomplete list

People who get really intense about Fate lore

Circular Firing Squad Leftists

Worm fans

Worm fans who hate Wildbow

Worm fans who have never read Worm

Worm fanfic authors who have never read Worm

Guys who use phrases like “omniversal tiering” with a straight face

Guys who are still really into Lyrical Nanoha in this foul year of our lord 2023

Guys who don’t read history books but have read one (1) Bret Deveraux article on the subject and will link it at you if you give them the slightest opportunity

A type of guy who isn’t actually a guy at all she just doesn’t know it yet

Guys who have been around since the late 90’s and remember when the site was about spaceship videos

People who have been banned from one of the sites and now lurk on the other one, bitterly

Hidden cryptofascists

[lifeattomsdiner]

pffffffft

(source)

[heroineimages]

More fantasy settings should change out their evil empire for militaristic, expansionist republics - and not broken, manipulated ones. 'Everyone votes, their votes mostly count, and they keep voting to burn the Elf Kingdom in order to loot the valuable ashen Elfwood.'

---Bret Devereaux

[st-just]

Impossible to overstate how endearing I find it when nerds write like this.

[theoutcastrogue]

Bret Devereaux or Roman CIA/FBI equivalents

“Were there pre-modern equivalents of such government institutions as the CIA (for spying) or the FBI (for crime investigation)?

So I cannot answer for every society here, but for the Romans I can provide something of an answer, which I would frame as “No, but.”  I think the key issue here is both the degree of centralization in what these organizations do and also their purpose.

Sending individuals into another country to get information on it – even in a clandestine manner – was not an unheard of thing to do in the ancient world, though given the limited control ancient states had over the movement of peoples such ‘spying’ often consisted simply of sending a few trusted members of court to go visit the other country’s court as ‘diplomats’ or as guests of local notables and report back everything they saw.  But that’s not really what we mean when we think of the CIA – we imagine a centralized bureaucracy with an official head that reports to the government, gathers large amounts of data on foreign countries and writes reports.  That the Romans did not seem to have had.

We do hear, once in Ammianus of ‘areani‘ (or arcani; the reading here is unclear) whose job was to travel and inform Roman generals of what was going on in neighboring countries, but these seem likely to be scouts and are only attested in Roman Britain, so this might just be a special unit of scouts that ranged north of Hadrian’s Wall to keep tabs on the people to the north.  There’s no sense of a larger or more pervasive intel operation and keep in mind we have the writings of senior commanders and senators (e.g. Seneca, Pliny, Cassius Dio) who would surely have been aware if there had been such a state organ.

Meanwhile when we think about the FBI, we imagine an internally directed organization whose goal is to detect and investigate crime.   Ancient societies (including the Romans) generally had no investigative police of any kind.  In the imperial period, Rome did have a sort of police force (though their primary job was as firefighters), the vigiles, who in addition to putting out fires kept a night watch and might respond to cries of alarm for things like burglaries, or do riot control.  But as far as we can tell they didn’t investigate crimes.  The Roman legal system lacked a public prosecutor in any event: if someone did a crime against you, you didn’t wait for the police to investigate and the state to charge, instead you went to a magistrate (here this might be the tresviri capitales or a praetor (either the praetor urbanus or praetor peregrinus, depending on the issue) and laid the charge yourself (and then you or your representative or patron, would prosecute).

What we do see emerge in the imperial period are what we might call ‘state security forces,’ but these are less the FBI and more akin to the KGB: their role wasn’t to investigate crimes but to detect threats to the state and the rule of the emperor (which means yes, ‘secret police’ predate modern investigative police by centuries).  Emperors used various formal and informal networks of spies and informants to try to root out conspiracies against their rule and almost any kind of official who moves around the empire but reported to the emperor (instead of a governor) might be suspected of being a way for the emperor to spy on the most dangerous (to him) people in the empire: his own legates who held military commands.

And so we get, for instance, the frumentarii, literally ‘grain guys’ (after frumentum, grain) whose job ostensibly was to ensure the food supply to the legions and deliver messages from Rome, but who rapidly got a reputation as the emperors spies (against his own subordinates), secret police and even assassins.  Likewise, Roman generals in the imperial period had bodyguards called speculatores (‘look outs,’ – they’re not praetorians anymore because these are legati, not praetors or consuls), who served also as scouts and message-runners and thus naturally as spies the emperor might use to keep tabs on his generals or on the loyalty of a province.  And later we hear of agentes in rebus in the Late Empire who were official couriers who – wait for it – emperors used as spies and informants against their subordinates in far-flung provinces, particularly after disbanding the frumentarii, whom the agentes in rebus replaced doing essentially the same job.  And this was doubtless alongside of other informal domestic spies.

– Bret Devereaux, Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies

[fallowhearth]

And I think the answer is that there are actually two kinds of city builders: games about cities as spaces for people and games about cities as systems for production. Most modern city builders are, in fact, the former, interested in the city as a place for people to live and work. [...]

And here, the jump backwards in design for Neb[uchadnezzar] and P[haroah: A New Era] was quite sharp. I knew back when I played Caesar III in 1999, I was supposed to kind of imagine a real living city underneath the systems I was interacting with. By contrast, in 2021 or 2023, the decision not to have even the fig-leaf of such a simulation is a design choice. Instead, strip off the thin layer of paint and you realize that mechanically these games have more in common with Factorio or Satisfactory than they do with Farthest Frontier or Cities: Skylines. Cities are not living, breathing spaces for people in Neb. or P:ANE but rather mechanistic mega-factories for producing specific goods (mostly armies and monuments) and so what gets simulated are the elements of industrial production; people who aren’t workers don’t matter. [...]

Certainly some of that is the old Impressions influence, but I also think it speaks to the way the ancient world is understood by developers and the public. Medieval city builders have increasingly come to imagine cities as being driven by and fundamentally being about the people who live in them (with some exceptions, e.g. Stronghold). But ancient cities are instead instrumental: economic engines for social elites to produce things they want with. Notably nearly all of the ancient city builders explicitly place the player as a ruler, a pharaoh, a Roman governor, a Mesopotamian king (in contrast to the player as a mayor or other sort of elected representative) and generally their scenarios are set by having the political powers that be set objectives for the city.

Bret Devereaux

[nerianasims]

"While there is ample ground to criticize the US military’s policies towards civilians since 1900, on the whole the United States tends, compared to other major states involved in the same or similar wars, to be on the low end of causing civilian death and suffering, though with some pretty important ‘black marks’ on that record. Americans focus – rightly so – on the morality of strategic bombing in Europe and Japan, but the fact is the vast majority of civilians killed in Europe and Asia in WWII were not killed by bombs from the sky but by soldiers on the ground with guns intentionally murdering civilians. Strategic bombing over Germany killed an estimated 400,000 civilians, a terrible figure – but the German government today estimates that Soviet expulsions alone may have killed as many as two million civilians. Both the Nazis and the Red Army engaged in mass-atrocities on the Eastern Front at staggering scale (an estimated twenty million Soviet civilians were killed during the war). American strategic bombing over Japan killed approximately 400,000 civilians as well, but in contrast to an estimate that Japan caused between six and twenty million civilian deaths due to atrocities in the territory it controlled. I am no fan of strategic bombing, but while it did kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, it was not the primary driver of civilian casualties in WWII; intentional mass-murder on the ground was."

The amount of atrocities -- as in, intentional murder of civilians en masse, rape camps, etc. -- that the Soviet army perpetrated during World War II is staggering. Things which, guess what. America did not do.

We have got to put this "America the Great Satan" Russian propaganda to death. War is hell. But there are different levels of hell, and America is not at the bottom. We adore self-flagellation in this country; it makes us feel special. Sorry, but we are not that powerful, and we are not that evil. We're just somewhat better than average most of the time, middling along.