Now I know who’s responsible for that goddamn abomination of a song.

I now know who I’m going to assassinate once my time travel machine is finished.

I know this is the shitposting Lemmy and historical accuracy isn’t the goal here … But you don’t honestly think they put plantations in infertile places and used slaves for no reason right? They made a shit ton of money

Overall, you’re right, but I’d like to point out two caveats here:

1. Southern plantation farming was incredibly inefficient and utterly ruined the land it was practiced on - something that was recognized (and criticized) as early as George Washington. So they did build their plantations in fertile areas, but exhausted the soil and did very little to let it recover until George Washington Carver (unrelated) started spreading crop rotations around ~1900.

2. The aristocrats made a shitton of money relative to the average person, but they were much, much poorer - both individually and as a society - than the industrialized North. Northern farming, even, was much more efficient - but the Southern aristocracy perpetuated their system because control was more important than money. In the slavery (and sharecropping) system, the plantation class effectively ruled little fiefs of dependent ‘free’ farmers and unfree (legally or practically) Black labor, able to exercise wide-reaching control not just economically, but also socially, culturally, and politically. Given the choice between more luxury or more power, they chose more power, and used that power to perpetuate their sickened systems.

Explanation: What we were generally recognize as the physical form of a book in the modern day is formally called a codex - an invention of the 1st century AD Roman Empire that made reading and book storage much more efficient. Instead of a single sheet of paper that needed to be unraveled, smaller sheets were bound to a spine and protected with covers, progressing through the writing by turning the pages.

Stop living in the past! Embrace the F U T U R E!

Glory to Arzstoska. Cause no trouble.

[blows dust off VHS tapes]

Now there’s a meme I haven’t seen in a very long time…

Obi-Wan “Why does he get to be a young ghost”

I wonder who that’s for?

A fair barter is always honored by this one

… TIL people were punishing their fucking birds for whacking it.

have you tried downloading more RAM

🏴‍☠️

Mood.

“Yes… good… let the civilization flow through you!” - Romans trying to assimilate G*rmanics

Just doing my best to make a little historical trivia humor accessible! 🙏

Explanation: Octavian, later known as Augustus, was the grand-nephew and adoptive son (posthumously, by will) of Julius Caesar, of conqueror and dictator fame. Caesar was, famously, assassinated by the Senate, including by many Senators he had pardoned during the civil war, despite them taking up arms against him.

When it became apparent that the assassins of Julius Caesar had little support amongst the people of the city of Rome, they fled to the east and tried to raise an army to retake power (they would lose the ensuing, second civil war), while the ‘moderate’ conservatives who had only cheered on the assassination, not participated in it, tried to negotiate with Caesar’s supporters for some sort of reasonable accord to preserve their power. Of the ‘Second Triumvirate’, as they became known in historiography, Lepidus was a no-one, and Mark Antony was a brute who would have cheerfully executed every Senator who spoke out against him if he could have gotten away with it. Luckily, Caesar’s grand-nephew, so young and impressionable, was willing to work with the Senate towards a reasonable future

Unfortunately for the oligarchic Senate, the deeply cunning and manipulative Octavian had no intention of being their champion. Unfortunately for the Republic, he had no intention of being the champion of the democratic People’s Assemblies of the Roman Republic either. Instead, Octavian consolidated power and quietly sidelined (and sometimes executed) rivals until no one was left brave enough to openly oppose him. After his military victory over Mark Antony (who had allied himself with the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra during this third and final outbreak of civil war in Octavian’s lifetime), Octavian/Augustus made it clear, if only implicitly so, that there was no more power in the Republic without his say-so.

‘Funny’ enough, the Republic was not formally abolished after this, and Augustus, publicly, kept up the pretense that he was just a really special boi who had come into all these crazy offices of ultimate power with indefinite term lengths basically by accident during a period of crisis, just normal Republic things! After all, would some aspiring autocrat insist that he was merely the First Citizen, and First Amongst Equals? (Princeps and Primus inter pares)

The Romans would struggle with this split between reality and theory for the next ~300 years of what-we-now-call the Roman Empire, sometimes acknowledging the Emperor as autocratic, other times insisting that no, there was TOTALLY still functioning republican institutions, and that the Emperor was JUST the First Citizen who was a mouthpiece for the Senate and PEOPLE of Rome! Nothing to see here, folks! (Most elite writing took a view somewhere in-between these two extremes, acknowledging the Emperor was crazy-powerful to the point of dictatorship, but still envisioning the position of Emperor in basically magisterial, republican terms)

Also, the map is inaccurate, as that’s the 117 AD map of the Roman Empire, which had a few more bits and pieces than it did in Octavian’s time. XD

!map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz

@pugjesus@piefed.social

Kbin is my original, but Kbin went down years ago, before I even moved to Lemmy.world!

uwu

For the same reason Chaos and Wholesome are opposites

for the shitpost o7