IMPERIVM SINE FINE

Oh, I didn’t mean as a matter of optics for the public, just as a general “Association with repressive Soviet shitheads is undesirable”

Mod privilege is being able to erase bigots with a click of a button

Also why good moderation is so important

It does, unironically. Soviet aesthetics are pretty cool, a shame the Soviets ruined them by being the ones to use it.

Being comrades with someone with a Soviet ushanka sounds like a great way to have workers’ protests violently suppressed.

The slaves were much better off. Roman empire was a slave empire.

And the resulting polities were slave kingdoms. Wow. Much improvement.

That’s the main reason it’s celebrated in our empire. Europeans and the founding slavers of USA looked towards roman slavery as their ideal.

Wow, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard in the past 24 hours.

Arguing for the roman empire is like saying that USA was better before the Civil War.

what

Today the worship of this slave empire remains a foundation of white supremacy.

Yes, the foundation of white supremacy was a multiracial empire which had very mixed feelings on those pale G*rmanic savages and thought of Africans and Syrians as the smartest people in the world. You nailed it.

What the fuck are you on about

Yes. It was bad for slaves as well. The post-Roman polities maintained slavery, so it’s not “The slaves are now free”, it’s “The slaves are now under a system with a poorer quality of life for everyone, from top to bottom”.

What about those on the periphery, with minimal protection from the state both before and after the fall? For them, the only real difference was the tax collector stopped showing up.

Tax collector never stopped showing up - tax collector was just working for someone different after the Empire fell.

As for those on the periphery, the only ones which would have fit the idea of those with minimal protection from the state would have been those literally outside of the borders of the Empire - the Early Empire pursued highly proactive anti-raiding strategies on the border, with large forces ready to respond to any incursion, while the Late Empire stationed many small garrisons along all the borders.

Furthermore, there is ample evidence that the benefits of the Empire reached into the periphery, including the benefits of long-distance trade, high-quality consumer goods for the working class and peasantry, architectural expertise, and resolution of legal disputes.

Please don’t take this as analogous to the modern day in any way. A modern village/town will break down rapidly without access to modern logistics, which was not the case then.

No, places broke down then as well. After the Roman presence in Britain left, Britain itself not exactly being in the heartland of the Empire, the resulting collapse into infighting and outside raiders was so total that even things as simple and universally needed as pottery suffered a horrific decline in both amount produced and used in domestic consumption and in the quality of the work, to the point where post-Roman British pottery is instantly identifiable compared to Roman British pottery. Some 200 years pass before pottery quality begins to recover. Aqueducts stop working in short order if not dissembled and cleaned, lower quality roads (via glareata and via terrena) fade without regular maintenance, brigands destroy all semblance of trade and free travel, even farming techniques decline with large-scale local mortality without the ability of skilled migrants to transfer location and then transfer their skills.

Civilization is fragile, in all cases.

“God I love rampant brigandry and not having clean water. Oh, if only trade routes would shut down and feudalism would grow from the ashes of our society! It’s really too bad that ethnic supremacist polities didn’t rule over my people sooner, I love being excluded from legal protections due to an insufficiently pure bloodline.”

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was fucking horrible for normal people, and it’s bizarre to me that people think otherwise.

I apologize if this comes off as tetchy. I’m in an ill mood today.

Mood. Lest the doom become too strong, though, let me just note that Rome also survived a lot of insane incompetents at the helm.

Turn it up to 11

… it felt SUPER forced in the cartoons of the 80s and 90s. It’s not really any different. Probably less ham-fisted now, if anything.

Damn, I need to up my opening line game if this is what I’m competing with, smh, sapphics OP, pls nerf

Same. I was told “It’s nothing like the other MCU movies, you’ll love it!”, and I watched it and… it’s probably the best MCU movie I’ve seen, but still very MCU.

Okay, but how do you live like that

Cats, I think.

Mission failed successfully - the weird apes now help you reproduce in an ideal environment and protect you from predators.

Reverse image search led me here

Two 500mg tablets of acetaminophen please, thank you

-A Certified American