#in fact mostly anything about the tribunal is propaganda really

[venacoeurva]

Sorry 2 open a can of worms potentially but sometimes I think about how there are people out there that took the 36 lessons as literal and truth and questioned nothing about them and don’t view them as carefully tailored propaganda and metaphorical and symbolic in many instances, and uh

[trickstarbrave]

i really hate the fact the nord pantheon was just thrown to the wayside in favor for the imperial pantheon and any discussions i see of it are unsatisfying or even sometimes frankly stupid.

“it was 200 years” yeah a lot can change in 200 years but you mean to tell me i will have dunmer lecturing me at random going “oh btw we dont worship the tribunal anymore back to the good old good daedra for us :)” but absolutely 0 fucking explanation of how this happened. im just expected to know it. with the dunmer its kinda silly bc anyone who played thru all of morrowind to know enough about the tribunal worship in detail can probably infer it on their own and don’t need it spelled out for them. and people who haven’t probably wouldn’t know enough to think it was unusual. but sure go ahead and have that in to explain the lore as though my random 25 year old nord dragonborn pc would know anything about dunmeri customs and religious history. but the explanation for the widespread adoption of the imperial pantheon in favor of the nord pantheon???? just completely fuckin gone??? okay fine whatever

“well scandinavia was christianized in like 200 years so things change” the christianization of scandinavia is messy and unusual (and also took longer than like 200 years fully). they were converted mostly peacefully due to the relationship nordic people have with dieties--based on convenience. gods are like people you have relationships with, and sometimes those relationships are business relationships. also it was politically motivated to get some extra manpower from christians for various political battles and scuffles. the nords, while based loosely on pop cultural depictions of vikings, don’t actually follow this. they are people deeply rooted in tradition. change happens, and takes centuries to fully shift. two centuries may in theory be enough time to do that--but not without adequate explanation and see the above on that. they are prideful and at times arrogant. at best i could see them adopting a few compromises for politics, but the thing is imperial pantheon was already the compromise they were tolerating and not really adopting.

“well they needed unity for the great war” that means then that this change is around like, what, 40 years old at the most if i give them 10 years of hindsight for the great war happening. the great war started 30 years before skyrim began. it was not some monumental battle at the 200 years ago mark that would kick start the political shift. could i see it happening? yes. but that would mean ulfric--who is older than the great war very obviously--would probably be MUCH more politically motivated to instead be championing the adoption of the old nord pantheon the imperials tried to stamp out for political unity. in fact, this would be an even better motivation for his direct hostilities with the empire, because that means their religious persecution of nords was LONG before the fucking white gold concordant. but that isn’t what happened. instead this would have to mean 40 years ago at most (probably more around like, what, 32???) the empire forced the imperial pantheon down every nord’s throat, banned their worship of the nord pantheon effectively, redid all their shrines and temples during the war, converted a bunch of people to loving talos through propaganda, and then after the war ended said “nevermind you can’t worship talos anymore” and ulfric was ONLY mad about the last part. right. sure.

also frankly the religious diversity made the world of the elder scrolls more fucking interesting. it was cool to see it. it was interesting to see varieties of faith, different creation myths, complex religious history and shifts of faith. it was cool to see how these cultures evolved and changed through their history to be something alien and weird and to see other cultures react in universe to those differences. keeping the nordic pantheon would have made the game more interesting. but it also would have involved making a world that required more thinking on the part of the player to understand instead of turning off their brain and just thinking this is oblivion with vikings. rich lore previously established is gutted and ignored, only vague place names remaining. is saarthal inthe mage’s college about uncovering the mystery of the attach by snow elves on the atmorans? no its about the eye of magnus. okay, uh, are we gonna learn about the elven god magnus? no, just go to this old nord ruin that was the center of the dragon cult to retrieve an artifact to stop it. oh are we gonna learn about the dragon cult? no you idiot it became a training ground for archmages in disjointed puzzles, go kill some zombies draugar, fight a lich king dragon priest, get the artifact, and come back with no explanation of the arcane mysteries you’ve experience and take your prize of being the archmage now that everyone else is dead. don’t you feel satisfied and like you’re in a real living breathing world and role playing in it?

[awed-frog]

in which caesar doesn’t do anything much and all the women are named julia

[Hi, this is me stanning Adrian Goldsworthy’s biography of Caesar. I studied Classics, but not this period, so all I can contribute here are squeals of delight, a few mistakes and the occasional witty comment. If you’d like to know more, please buy the book - it’s really good and a fun read.]

PART 2

The thing is - there’s a lot of boring relevant political stuff going on in this chapter, but I’m mostly fascinated by the glimpses we get into the world of Roman women. 

As I said, this is not really my area, so I know random, unconnected facts about how life was like for them; also it doesn’t make much sense to talk about ‘Roman women’, because, as a reminder, ‘Rome’ stretches from the 14th century BC to the 14th century AD, came to include dozens of very different regions, and obviously was home to an incredibly diverse population. And if we’re talking about the late Republican / imperial aristocracy, there’s a sharp divide anyway: on the one hand, the ‘ideal woman’ is the same old model we’re all used to and heard about (silent, obedient, virtuous, chaste, a perfect mother and so on), but on the other, Roman noblewomen had a lot more freedom than, say, their Greek counterparts, so there was usually some political scheming going on - something that in Greece was reserved to a handful of very well-placed courtesans. 

(In this sense, think about the contrast between Lucretia, the mythological wife of Collatinus, whose fridging created the Republic, and Agrippina, mother of Nero, empress and all-round badass bitch.)

Anyway, this chapter made me think about women because it starts with Caesar being born and getting his name - it’s sort of an urban legend, btw, that every single Roman had three names: that was just for the Moste Noblest - and how Goldsworthy casually mentions that, unlike men, women of noble birth would just take their family surname as first name. In Caesar’s family, for instance, all the women were named Julia.

(As a reminder: his given name was Caius, then ‘Julius’ identified the tribe, and finally ‘Caesar’ was a nickname that was possibly given to his grandfather for something elephant-related. 

People whose grandfathers did not do elephant-related stuff generally never enjoyed the prestige of a funny nickname passed down through the generations.)

So it’s bad enough that twins might be named ‘Peter and Not-Peter’ or ‘Peter and Twin’, but imagine going to the park with your buggy and meeting your old friend Oldest She-Jones (daughter of Ferdinand Jones), now married to George David Taylor, and her five kids - Louis David Taylor, She-Taylor, She-Taylor the Second, She-Taylor the Third and She-Taylor Born on Christmas. So damn cute, and also the reason why the Romans never developed smartphones or social media - how the hell are you supposed to find someone on Vultocodex when every single cousin and aunt has the exact same name?

Poor management, that is.

But anyway - as I said, there’s a dissonance here because women being treated like garbage (like, not given normal names and married off at fourteen) also led to the very peculiar phenomenon: generations of (male) politicians and VIPs being raised by very forceful, strong, and ambitious (widowed) mothers. Because if you count old age, wars, trampolining injuries (let’s be honest, men have always been obsessed with attempting dangerous stunts just for the fun of it) and the general risks of Roman politics, it was very usual for a noble kid to not even remember his father at all.

(Nero is a good example of how weird and all-consuming this boy-mother relationship could become - there’s entire books about it, but I’d point 16-and-over readers to Suetonius’ Life of Nero for details.

Keep in mind 95% of it is propaganda because Suetonius hated Nero, but still. HBO-worthy stuff in there.)

All this to say - we know that Caesar had a very close relationship with his mom (named ‘Aurelia’ because - you guessed it - she came from the Aurelii family), who was a near perfect figure of virtue, intelligence, beauty and common sense. Very powerful in her own right, Aurelia raised Caesar basically on her own, because her (much older) husband was either away at war or dead for most of their marriage.

Aside from drinking in Aurelia’s wisdom, Caesar’s education also included the normal lessons noble Roman boys were required to learn: self-worth, narcissism, delusional manias, rhetoric, martial arts, horse-riding, and writing really bad fanfiction based on Greek myths.

And now for the MEANWHILE part.

(I have no idea why this gif was tagged ‘meanwhile’, but I’m not enough of an idiot to let it go to waste, so.)

Meanwhile, all sort of messes were going on.

As I’m sure you remember, at some point the consul was Marius - Caesar’s uncle and a military genius, but not much of a politician. His negotiation tactic of choice was secretly inviting groups of unconnected people to his house on the same night, serving them dinner in two separate rooms so they wouldn’t see one another and try to work out some kind of agreement between them. Whenever a new point came up, Marius would say he had diarrhoea, pretend to run to the bathroom and instead sit down with the second group and see what they thought about the first group’s proposal.

(Isn’t ancient Rome magnificent?)

A big problem Marius had to deal with was how to grant citizenship to the allied tribes in Italy without pissing off current citizens. Basically no one wanted these other guys to be given new rights, but since they supplied more than half the soldiers of the Roman army and got nothing in return, their patience was running a bit thin. At some point, Roman bureaucrats started to erase foreign-born citizens from their lists claiming they were not actual citizens (something so openly dishonest NO OTHER GOVERNMENT would EVER attempt it again), and next yet another tribune working on a citizenship reform was stabbed to death in the street. 

So the allies went to war. 

(This war, confusingly, is known as the Social War, because ‘socius’ means ‘ally’ in Latin.)

As you can imagine, it was a disaster. Most of the allied communities had been part of the Roman republic for I don’t want to check but let’s say decades, they lived side by side with Roman families and fought in the same wars, so it was more of a civil war than anything else. Some tribes chose to remain faithful to Rome, others didn’t. Lots of people died.

Caesar was too young to be a soldier, but this was Cicero’s first taste of war (bet you never thought of that weaselly weasel as a soldier, uh? appearances can be deceiving, folks!). Marius was also involved, but since he was old as shit and had famously weak and leaky guts (hahahhaha), he mostly stayed out of active combat, which wasn’t all that normal for a Roman general. In the end, the whole of Italy, down to defeated tribes, cows, dogs and random patches of mossy rocks, was granted citizenship and everyone went home. Their votes, however, were inserted in the system in such a way that they didn’t count much. 

On the whole, the one winner of this war was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, one of the military commanders, who became a consul soon after.

Another war, because this is Rome and Romans were dicks, but! this one was in the East, which means every single soldier would get super rich and also! wars in the East were considered easy because *insert racist trope here* and! Sulla had been promised that, as the big winner of the Social War, he could go there with his legions and basically enjoy this Disneyland of golden cups and ultraviolence but! at the last moment, Marius, who never liked Sulla much, managed to snatch the commandership from him, which! was completely legal but also *insert outraged emoji* and wait for it! instead of going gentle into the good night, Sulla made a fiery speech to his soldiers all like GUESS WHAT FOLKS WE’RE STUCK HERE SCRATCHING OUR TESTICULI AND THOSE IDIOTS FROM THE 25TH ARE TAKING YOUR GOLD AND YOUR UNWILLING WOMEN and! Sulla’s entire army marched! on! the! city! of! Rome!

It was the first time a Roman army had ever invaded Rome. Nobody was expecting it, and people panicked. Sulla’s men won easily, burned down some buildings, killed some people, generally had a great time; and then Sulla announced a bounty for anyone who’d disembowel his political enemies (including Marius) because he didn’t have time to go to Braavos and learn how to do it himself (remember, he still had his war waiting for him in the East).

(This turned out to be a success, btw. One guy was even killed by his slave - Sulla gave him the promised reward, then shoved him off a mountain because duh, slave and “When I said ‘anyone’, I meant people, not IKEA furniture” and “Honestly”.)

As nobody could have imagined and/or predicted, as soon as Sulla left for Greece Weak Guts Marius came back with an army and took back the city, beheading his way to the Senate and leaving a trail of blood wherever he passed. As soon as he got there, however, he dropped dead - heart attack, trampolining, diarrhoea, who can tell - and the city was taken over by his second-in-command, Lucius Cornelius Cinna.

(Man, what a ride.)

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know what Caesar was doing during this time.

Personally, I like to imagine him in Rome - a well-dressed, grey-eyed 15-year-old, freshly orphaned, horrified and exhilarated by the violence exploding all around him - I see him running down the streets, stopping to watch the corpses float in the dark waters of the Tiber, daring his friends to go and touch the severed heads nailed to the doors of the Senate; recognizing many of those heads as friends and colleagues of his father and uncle (passing a hesitant finger on the cold flesh, remembering how they’d once laughed and frowned and spoken about boring matters from the dais). 

The truth is, Caesar was just a kid. He was supposed to learn about the Republic, and his own role in making it great, by watching his elders. 

God knows what he actually learned, and what he thought, as he was passing through Rome’s paved streets, now shimmering with blood. 

PREVIOUS — NEXT

[xtruss]

Don’t Blame Bat Soup for the Coronavirus

Racist memes target Chinese eating habits, but the real causes of the virus are more mundane.

In countries where clashes against ethnic Chinese are rampant, misunderstandings over the origin of the coronavirus have turned nasty, even fueling government and public prejudices, FP’s James Palmer writes.

— By James Palmer | January 27, 2020 | Foreign Policy

A vendor (C) wearing a facemask offers meat at a near-empty market on the eve of the Lunar New Year in Wuhan on January 24, 2020.

As news of the novel coronavirus spread online, one video became emblematic of its claimed origin: It showed a young Chinese woman, supposedly in Wuhan, biting into a virtually whole bat as she held the creature up with chopsticks. Media outlets from the Daily Mail to RT promoted the video, as did a number of prominent extremist bloggers such as Paul Joseph Watson. Thousands of Twitter users blamed supposedly “dirty” Chinese eating habits—in particular the consumption of wildlife—for the outbreak, said to have begun at a so-called wet market that sold animals in Wuhan, China.

There was just one problem. The video wasn’t set in Wuhan at all, where bat isn’t a delicacy. It wasn’t even from China. Instead it showed Wang Mengyun, the host of an online travel show, eating a dish in Palau, a Pacific island nation. Sampling the bat was simply an addition to the well-trodden cannon of adventurism and enthusiasm for unusual foods that numerous American chefs and travel hosts have shown in the past.

At a time of heightened fear over a viral pandemic, the Palau video has been deployed in the United States and Europe to renew an old narrative about the supposedly disgusting eating habits of foreigners, especially Asians. Images of Chinese people or other Asians eating insects, snakes, or mice frequently circulate on social media or in clickbait news stories. This time, that was mixed with another old racist idea: that the “dirty” Chinese are carriers of disease. Many Americans long believed that, as the New York Daily Tribune wrote in 1854, Chinese people were “uncivilized, unclean, filthy beyond all conception.” Today, those same ideas have often been transferred to other groups such as South American refugees, yet they still persist in the way some Westerners think about China.

At a time of heightened fear over a viral pandemic, the Palau video has been deployed in the United States and Europe to renew an old narrative about the supposedly disgusting eating habits of foreigners, especially Asians.

These prejudices can fuel fear and racism. As the virus spreads, the Chinese as a group are more and more likely to be blamed for its incubation and spread. In countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, where there are already clashes around ethnic Chinese, those sentiments could turn nasty. In the West, especially under the Trump administration, it could fuel both government and public prejudices.

To be sure, the treatment of wildlife may be at the root of the virus. Wet markets where live animals are sold, mostly for food or medicine, still exist in most Chinese cities, and the Huanan Seafood Market was originally believed to be the source of this outbreak. The Chinese government has banned the wildlife trade until the epidemic is over.

But as it turns out, the market may not have been the cause of the outbreak at all. A new study shows that the early known victims had no contact with the market. And although the virus, at present, does seem to have originated in bats, it’s unclear how it made its way to humans. It’s quite likely no chowing down on the creatures of the night was involved.

Many Chinese people certainly like tucking into dishes Americans would consider unusual, though a lot of this is confined to very high-end or weirdly macho audiences, such as Beijing’s penis restaurant. But the standards of what animals we do and don’t eat are culturally arbitrary. Vegetarianism is morally consistent, but deploring the eating of dogs while tucking into companionable and intelligent pigs isn’t. (I myself have eaten many things others might find gross: dog soup, insects, Chicago deep-dish pizza.) And it goes both ways: A lot of East Asians, for instance, find the taste of lamb disgusting. The range of tastes inside China is as great as it is outside; the Cantonese habit of eating “everything with four legs save the table and everything that flies but the airplane” is a standing joke in the rest of the country.

And when it comes to disease, it’s not what’s being eaten that matters as much as the conditions—such as the standards workers are trained to meet, the lack of barriers at markets, and the absence or bribing of regulators and health inspectors. The H1N1 virus, after all, started not in any uncommon species, but in pigs.

And that’s where China really does have issues. The country’s food safety standards are notoriously bad, despite numerous government-led initiatives to improve them. Food scandals are common, and diarrhea and food poisoning are a distressingly regular experience. Markets, like Huanan, that aren’t licensed for live species nevertheless sell them. Workers are undertrained in basic hygiene techniques like glove-wearing and hand-washing. Dangerous additives are commonly used to increase production.

China’s conditions are not unique. It looks, in fact, a lot like the United States did in the past, before muckraking exposés led to the creation of modern regulation systems. Even today, the United States can lag behind best practices on such issues as antibiotics in feed, cattle slaughter, or poultry washing. And, as with the American public of the 1900s, the Chinese citizenry badly wants change. Seventy-seven percent of the public ranks food safety as their single biggest concern.

As with so much else in China, politics gets in the way of sensible policy. Exposés of the kind that drove reform in the United States have a hard time finding traction in China’s censorious media environment, where the interests of billion-dollar corporations and their party backers often override those of the public. When the author Zhou Qing wrote a groundbreaking exposé, What Kind of God, on the Chinese food industry in 2006, two-thirds of the book was removed before publication and its success eventually forced him into political exile.

Part of China’s problem can be attributed to the power of traditional Chinese medicine, which is responsible for much of the trade in wildlife. Many wild animals in China are killed not for culinary reasons but for essentially magical ones. Whether it’s tiger paws or pangolin scales, quack cures persist on a vast scale—even in cases like bear bile where a real active ingredient existed, has been discovered, and can be produced in labs without animal cruelty. The government has been heavily promoting traditional Chinese medicine, especially under President Xi Jinping’s new nationalism, and while officially pharmaceutical companies following this model eschew the wildlife trade, the propaganda around such traditional medicine in general helps ensure belief survives.

If the fallout from the Wuhan outbreak changes anything for the better, it may be that it gives a vital push to reform and more teeth to regulation. But as with so many past disasters in China, it could also mean a brief period of change before profits and power take precedence once again. Whatever happens, amid the current moment of fear and panic, support for the Chinese public will make a bigger difference than culinary judgments or racism.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally used the term “Wuhan virus” to refer to the coronavirus. It has been updated in line with WHO recommendations.

James Palmer is a senior editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @BeijingPalmer