#third century crisis

[grayjoy15]

Geta and Caracalla enter the Circus Maximus, dressed in the colors of their favorite racing factions! Short rant below cut:

Yes, this is in reaction to Gladiator II — there were parts of it that I did like, and I thought that Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger did a great job in their roles, but Caracalla and Geta were not white, they were brown with Syrian and North African origins. Additionally, these brothers did not get along, to the point that they divided the palace between them and their supporters, and Caracalla — the older brother! Not twins! — entirely of his own will had Geta assassinated in front of their own mother. To be fair to him, however (he’s known for his cruelty), Geta would probably have had him assassinated if he hadn’t beaten his brother to it.

These were not sheltered emperors. While they weren’t fantastic at administering the empire (their mom took care of all that), they were well educated, military minded, and much more independent than the film portrays.

[twofielder]

Coin of the Day #106 (8/18/2024)

I’m probably just going to keep picking from this bag, there’s so many nice ones…

Roman Splinter State - Gallic Empire

BI Antoninianus - 22mm 4.33g

Postumus 266-267 AD

Treveri Mint

Obverse IMP C POSTVMVS P F AVG

Bust of Postumus right, radiate, draped, cuirassed

Reverse SALVS AVG

Aesculapius (Asclepius) standing right, head left, leaning on serpent staff, globe at feet

Mairat 348

[neighbourhoodtwo]

mods r asleep post roman emperor tierlist

[faaun]

omg i FEEL you about the asd articles... i'm cuttently studying psychology and THIS makes me wanna go and pursue a job in research after graduating :')

yeah !! you should! i study a very interdisciplinary degree and out of all the fields I study in (ML/phil/psych/neuro) psychology has the most inconsistent, outright harmful, sometimes misinformed-at-best info sprinkled into publications and even lectures and it's a genuine source of frustration ! we need def need more researchers committed to accuracy and fairness and eliminating stigmas, biases, etc. :)

[sistersorrow]

TikTok really trying to give me "thinking of the Roman Empire" dysphoria

[infirmux]

i have reason to believe something has happened to those businessmen

[asagi-asagiri]

“Hard times create strong men” is the dumbest cope.

[cynicalclassicist]

Nice to know that South Korea respects the law more than the US and actually punishes people for attempting coups.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's attempt to impose martial law collapsed after 190 Members of Parliament barricaded themselves into the National Assembly chamber and voted to end martial law while the military tried to break in to stop them before they could vote. Many members had to climb a fence at the back of the building to break in to get a majority of the 300 member body in the room to vote.

[alexjcrowley]

Frank Zappa put liquid cocaine in One Size Fits All

[maester-of-spreadsheets]

The fact we know more about Cicero and Atticus’s daily life than we do about the entire Crisis of the Third Century™️ is hilarious to me

[alewaanewspaper1960]

أثر أزمة القرن الثالث الميلادي على فلسطين - دراسة تاريخيَّة وأثريَّة

أثر أزمة القرن الثالث الميلادي على فلسطين – دراسة تاريخيَّة وأثريَّة   أثر أزمة القرن الثالث الميلادي على فلسطين – دراسة تاريخيَّة وأثريَّة الكاتب : دكتور لؤي محمد أبو السعود . دكتور أمجد أبو العز الملخص: تهدف هذه الدراسة إلى التعرف إلى أزمة القرن الثالث الميلادي في روما وأثرها على فلسطين من جميع جوانب الحياة المختلفة مُنذ اغتيال الإمبراطور الروماني ألكسندر سيفي��وس (Alexander Severus)عام 235م حتى…

[twofielder]

Coin of the Day #11 (5/15/2024)

Here’s one from a breakaway state of the 3rd century crisis…

Roman Breakaway State - Palmyrene Empire

BI Antoninianus - 20mm 2.92g

Vaballathus + Aurelian 270-272 AD

Antioch Mint

Obverse VABALATHVS V C R IM D R

Bust of Vaballathus right, laureate, draped, cuirassed

Reverse IMP C AVRELIANVS AVG

Bust of Aurelian right, radiate, cuirassed, Z below

RIC V 381

[elbiotipo]

Many people here think that they can "escape from Argentina/Latin America" (a stupid concept to begin with) but what I see instead is that most developed and semi-developed countries, with a few exceptions, are actually Argentina in the 90s, and are heading to a 2001 crash in different speeds.

What I mean by this is that in the 80s-90s, most countries adopted neoliberalism and capitalism just stopped focusing on producing things, at all, and became all about finances (finacialization). At the same time, neoliberalism destroyed the state (unions, welfare state, public infraestructure and investment, healthcare and education) in favor of expanding the market. Which now, with financialization, it doesn't produce anything anymore.

In Argentina we did it quick crazy and fast with Menem, and that's why we crashed so hard and fast in the 2001 crisis (and also with the 1976 dictatorship and now with Milei). Other countries like the US or most of Europe have centuries of accumulated wealth, and so they could cushion themselves on that for decades. But now that's running out. Inflation is rising, unemployment, destruction of local economies, lack of infrastructure, an absent state, social crises, political extremism... Eventually, neoliberalism comes back and destroys you. Here in the third and second world, we experienced it fast. The first world will be hit too, just with delay.

Again, the world is Argentinizing, and in not in a fun way.

[papasmoke]

Man do you really think the whole “100 million deaths at the hands of the govt in the USA” thing is inevitable

You're right a rapidly accelerating climate crisis won't lead to horrors unseen in the history of man everything's gonna continue to be normal don't worry about it! Sure a third of Pakistan was displaced in a century defining flood and forest fire season gets worse every year and droughts are happening more frequently but stuff like that is aberrant and not at all representative of larger trends. Surely if it were representative of an increasingly unstable climate the US wouldn't desperately cling to power and resources through violence as an exponentially increasing percentage of the global south is displaced and starved, right?

[whereserpentswalk]

You have a computer that can access the internet of any dimension. You don't have the ability to physically go places, just to observe them and interact with them through this one machine.

Sometimes you'll just do it for fun. Seeing other timeline's versions of sites and the content that's created there. Getting to see work from artists if they hadn't sold out or moved on. Or getting to see what YouTube is like in a world where it never become corpratized. Or get to go on Vine in a world where vine exists in 2024. You've read writing from Shakespeare if he had been sent to the new world, seen stories from Lovecraft if he had unlearned his bigotry, seen experimental films from George Lucas if star wars had floppe, heard music from Kurt Cobain if he hadn't died young.

And you've gone off to weirder places to. You've seen what political discourse is like in a world where Constantine converted to Buddhism instead of chrsitianity, where that's the dominant religion of the west. And you'll see conservatives talking about how sjws are undermining the west's Buddhist values, or YouTube videos talking about chrsitantiy as this forgotten dead religion from the crisis if the third century. And you asked someone in the comments of that video what they thought a world would be like if chrsitanity survived, and they said it was impossible, that it was doomed to die out just because it did.

And you've talked to people from a world where humanity lives underground, where an apocalypse made the surface of the world uninhabitable, and every human on earth lives in massive subterranean complexes. You talked to them about what they wanted, if they wanted to see the sun, see the forests and the birds and the creatures that they knew were above them, and most of them didn't really want it. Most of them didn't really want to see the surface, they had grown up having never seen it, it didn't bother them, they were confused why anyone would be that committed to finally go somewhere that humans weren't. And there was one person who told you they did always really want to see it, that it's their hyperfixation, but that they'd obviously go back with the other humans if they had the chance, that they couldn't live somewhere without them.

And you've seen a world where humans where dead, where only robots and ai and cyborgs were still around. And even though they couldn't touch you, you were afraid, because you thought they would hate you. But they didn't, on every site where they talked about humans they talked about how cool you were, and how much aprication they had for their culture. And when you made a post asking if they'd want to hurt humans if they saw them, everyone who replied called you weird.

You've seen the internet in a world where cryptids and monsters are real. And you ended up on a forum for vampires. And you asked a newly turned vampire how they felt, and they said it was cold, that their body felt so cold, but it was still their body, and that they still wanted to live, still wanted to find a way to enjoy their life even if they didn't like their body.

And you've seen a world where all humans are completely aroace, and don't desire sex or romance at all. And you decided to upload sexual and romantic art, and even fetish art, to one of their sites. And the people there loved it, despite not understanding its purpose, they loved the way the artist depicted the world, saw it as so unique and strange, as something weirdly beautiful, and not at all gross, because nobody ever told them such things were gross.

And you've made online freinds from other worlds. People who you can never touch, never see, but who you see through their words. You've comforted someone who doesn't exist in your world, from a country that doesn't exist in your world, but you've comforted them, and made sure they don't get hurt or hurt themself, from very far away, because despite everything you can't help but care.

Mabye the internet isn't that bad. Mabye the world isn't all horrible. Mabye people aren't that bad.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The degrowthers are right: There needs to be a lot less physical stuff produced, especially in the way of fossil fuels, and, for anyone with the least sense of justice, this means rich countries consuming less and poor countries consuming more. Such an apparent threat of rich-country austerity meanwhile contains, in truth, the promise of abundance: fewer but more durable goods, less work and more leisure. (Already in the 1990s, the French-Austrian ecosocialist André Gorz wanted to “build the civilization of liberated time” in place of that of wage labor.) The fact that any such global rebalancing of consumption patterns can’t plausibly take place so long as the rich countries of the Global North dictate world history is one more reason that degrowth remains a dead letter under capitalism. It is not, however, the working classes of the Global North that must drastically curtail their lifestyles: The world’s richest 1 percent are responsible for as much carbon emissions as the poorest two-thirds of the global population. Much of the work of degrowth would be accomplished by the dispossession and destruction of the class represented by this sole percentile. As for the idolaters of growth, their god has not only failed but, Cronus-like, has started devouring its children as if these were so many chicken wings. “Growth” fantasizes one kind of fake substance, and “degrowth” another; real intelligence demands attention to how the ingredients of this world are different, not the same. Even so, the advocates of degrowth (a more attractive English word might be Samuel Beckett’s “lessness”) can boast of a sounder moral and political intuition than can the usual apologists for growth: Less stuff, more life! Such an argument may be obviated soon enough, either way, by the specter not of degrowth communism, but of prolonged capitalist contraction. Voters and politicians whistling past the graveyard being prepared for our children may have neglected to consult a recent article in Nature which holds that “the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emissions choices” (emphasis mine). Important factors in this bleak outlook include the declining agricultural yields and the massive and unpredictable damage to infrastructure attendant on climate collapse. In other words, even if carbon emissions are somehow reduced through the magic of the market, climate change can be expected to cause about $38 trillion in damages annually by the mid-century, enough to render overall economic growth infeasible. The choice facing the 21st century, then, is likely not between degrowth and growth. It is more likely between a form of capitalist contraction in which prosperity endures for a few but evaporates for the rest of us, and some kind of socialist or communist degrowth in which the well-being of everyone in general prevails over the wealth of anyone in particular. The precise politics of egalitarian degrowth are no more clear to me than they are to Saitō. But universal crisis will license strategies that theory alone could never discover.

26 August 2024