This is simply and obviously wrong in easily demonstrable ways, from the expansiveness of Roman citizenship to the incorporation of Persian elites under Alexander and the Seleucids (however poorly) to obvious things like the numbers of Scots in key posts in the British Empire.

https://twitter.com/bumbadum14/status/1951650993654865973

One thing that white nationalists all seem to share is an absolutely astoundingly terrible grasp of history, unable to imagine the - again, quite obvious - fact that people in the past defined racial & ethnic boundaries differently than we do and that those boundaries were fluid.

So as @WalterScheidel himself has already pointed out, the figures are entirely hallucinated. They're just made up.

But also anyone even remotely familiar with the evidence would know that the evidence doesn't exist to even make such estimates. 1/

https://twitter.com/grok/status/1949936087247335715

(Grok has also, unsurprisingly, parroted Musk's own catastrophic misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of Augustus' moral legislation - which was aimed at family's in Rome's tiny sub-2% elite, not at general population.

No surprise there.) 2/

This is correct. Women worked in nearly all households in nearly all periods of human history; sometimes that labor was gendered, frequently not.

The 1950s ideal household is an accident of the industrial revolution allowing regular people to live like rich people had.

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1945984579942187316

We're not quite to discussing labor in peasant households in my on-going series of pre-modern peasant lifestyles (keeping in mind peasants made up 90+% of the population pre-1750) but functionally all women worked, beginning very young and essentially never 'retiring.'

Worth answering 'on main' & cross-posting from The Good Place.

Victor Davis Hanson's work has been reappraised in 2 ways: the quality of his work substantially changed post-1998, but also the arguments of his early work experienced pushback, which he has largely not answered. 1/ Let's start with the early works, by which we mostly mean Warfare and Agriculture (1983; rev. 1998), Western Way of War (1989) and The Other Greeks (1995).

These, especially WWoW, made substantial impacts when they first appeared, set the 'orthodoxy' on hoplites in the 90s. 2/

Seems bad!

For reference, my understanding is that the Iranian 'highly enriched' Uranium is about 60% u-235.

Little Boy (the Hiroshima bomb) used 64kg of 80% enriched uranium.

Modern 'weapons grade,' enrichment is generally about 90% u-235.

https://twitter.com/evanhill/status/1936924337656721687

('Enrichment' here is sorting out fissile u-235 (about 0.7% of naturally occurring uranium) from stable u-238 (the other ~99.3%)).

So it sure seems like if you were going to attempt a first-strike against a uranium enrichment program, you'd want to know where the uranium was.

I disagree - there were 11 US Army colonels from Virginia in 1861 and only one of them betrayed his oath to the United States - but I wonder if @MattWalshBlog would be willing to extend his logic to someone in LA who shoots ICE agents to 'stand beside' his community in battle? To be clear:
1) As far as I know, no one in LA has tried to shoot at ICE - they're protestors, not rebels, no matter what the administration says and
2) No one should start shooting at ICE, obviously.

But I do want to highlight the hypocrisy here of who 'gets' to rebel.

There's an episode in Plutarch during the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, where Marcus Antonius (Antony) at a major Roman festival (the Lupercalia) offers Caesar a crown.

But the crowd isn't buying it: the cheer when Caesar refuses the crown. 1/ And Plutarch reports there was a bit of a pantomime, where Antony would offer the crown and the crowd would sulk, only the sycophants would cheer.

And then Caesar would refuse it, and the crowd would cheer loudly.

And again: offer and silence; refusal and cheers. 2/

It's astounding to watch him bluster because of how clear it is that he's emoting with missiles rather than engaging in strategy.

'I'm angry, so I'm gonna toss $2m missiles into $500 hovels until you stop" without any sense of if that will actually make someone stop. 1/

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1901274726271431155

Now it is fair to also fault Biden for engaging in a water-treading 'solution' of escorts and smaller-scale strikes against missile sites, but Hegseth is running blindly into the very constraints that produced that approach.

It is the blindness that is remarkable.
2/

One of the things that made the Roman Republic's alliance system in Italy - upon which was built the lion's share of Rome's victories - so successful was that the Romans handled the system tactfully.

Part of the 'deal' of the system was 'we won't humiliate you.' 1/ The process of *becoming* a Roman 'ally' in the moment of conquest or submission, might involve humiliation (and a lot of violence), but after that, you were 'in the club' and Rome would tolerate no violence against you or humiliation of you. 2/

Some people seem a bit confused so let's talk: what Great Man Theory is, why I think Silver is wandering into it and why it doesn't work.

The key thing here is fundamentally it is two propositions that come as a 'package deal' - reject either and it isn't Great Man Theory. 1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1892968829799563769

When folks react with confusion at the rejection of Great Man Theory by historians, it is generally because they think it is just the first proposition, which we might put as, "historical events are often shaped by the decisions of key, powerful leaders." 2/

Ah, great man theory.

There's a reason most remotely competent historians abandon this model of reasoning by the end of their first year of graduate study.

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1892799731161563213

Certainly history is sometimes influenced dramatically by highly capable people. Of course, hereditary monarchy being what it is, just as often key decisions are made by rulers who aren't very capable at all.

See, for instance, the July Crisis.

This was in response to the president-elect saying the use of military force to seize Panama or Greenland was on the table.

So let's talk briefly about why geopolitics and military force are not, in fact, analogous to poker. 1/

https://twitter.com/djmedinah/status/1876713534647623835

The first thing to understand is that war for modern states is always a net loss; *any* use of military force is losing, because warfare is so catastrophically expensive that no state can hope to gain enough to offset its costs.

So you are gambling over a *negative* pot. 2/

I'm sympathetic to arguments that academics need to do better communicating with the public, but @wesyang is not @DrAllyLouks ' colleague and universities are predicated on the reasonable notion that only those at the edge of human knowledge are qualified to assess work there. 1/

https://twitter.com/ProfBZZZ/status/1868605270857064843

That's not a slight at @wesyang but merely a true thing. No one does everything.

I'm not qualified to assess someone's physics research - either to know if it is well done or to know if it advances the field.

Which is why we leave that decision to folks in the field! 2/

This week on the blog: closing thoughts on Gladiator II and how it treats the city of Rome, gladiators and the Severan dynasty.

In particular, we look at why the real, historical Caracalla is history's crushing rebuttal to this film's own themes.

acoup.blog/2024/12/13/col… In any case, the movie isn't *good* but what is surprising is that it mangles the Severans so badly that it doesn't seem to realize that the real Caracalla *is* the man-of-violence the film thinks Rome needs, but that actually turned out really badly in the event.

Kinda odd to ask a question and turn off replies, sort of defeats the purpose.

But its gone very badly and quite obviously so. As a move to weaken or deter Israel, a pretty miserable and counter-productive failure that got more Yemenis and Palestinians killed on the net. 1/

https://twitter.com/Aldanmarki/status/1858318011880579559

Red Sea shipping remains down by about 50%, which hasn't meaningfully deterred Israel, but did contribute (with a whole bunch of other things) to a political climate in which you have an incoming administration whose position is essentially a green-light for Gaza annexations. 2/

Apparently this comment is sparking debate as if it really counts as 'mind control' if someone doesn't control your actions, but merely your sense perception so you can only see and hear a convincing fake world they present.

I am gonna contend that yes, that is 'mind control.'

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1857455753071661327

If someone can make you see and hear things which are not there, and disguise things that are such that you don't know that, say, your city is burning and under siege, I don't think you are operating with complete free will and can be understood to be under a form of coercion.

So in the last 24 hours, I've seen serious, well-informed people conclude that Trump's nominees
1) are obviously unconfirmable
2) will obviously be confirmed
3) there will be no confirmation process.

I think that high level of uncertainty is notable and quite bad. 1/ I think the source of it is its just really hard to understand a 'normal' reason to nominate a bunch of people (Hegseth, Gabbard, Gaetz, esp.) who would be obviously unconfirmable in normal circumstances for any other administration.

It prompts confusing, upsetting questions. 2/

Further DA: Veilguard thoughts: I've heard folks rip on the writing. I think it's not *bad* but it also isn't strong.

Part of the problem for me is not enough thought was put in to how individuals embedded in this world might talk about things. 1/ Take for example, the Evanuris, the gods of the Elves, who are a major part of the plot. Regardless of background or faction, characters generally call them 'the gods' or 'the risen gods.'

Two problems: one, hearing that over again sounds strange and two there's no variation. 2/

So I was listening to @ezraklein podcast with Jon Stewart & struck around the midpoint as they tried to get at anxiety & polarization.

It put me in mind of something re: the fall of the Roman Republic - 'the Republic' clearly meant different things to different Romans. 1/ At the beginning of my Rome course or my Rome unit in the anc. history survey, we lay out what the Roman Republic was in institutions (blog version of that here: ) and most students decide that 'the Republic' is a system of voting and office holding. 2/acoup.blog/2023/07/21/col…

I just...who wants this to be the culture in our country? Who wants to tell their kids, "these are our values?"

And sure, there are spaces for off-color jokes (although this is also distressingly racist), but "the process where we decide who gets the nuclear codes" ain't it.

https://twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1850623459564351892

More than anything, I hate how these years have cheapened and profaned our public, civic exercises.

And sure, a lot of politicians are not good people, but the *pretense* was still valuable, the tribute bad men had to pay to our collective values.

This is just...base. Vile.

I would phrase this differently: that the ability of my field to demand tax dollars - that is, resources that are the product other's labor - is directly connected to the degree to which we provide a public good.

Education is a key public good, but not solely measured by majors.

https://twitter.com/AsheeshKSi/status/1848062543971127643

Historical investigation, for its own sake, may be a sublime good in and of itself, but if we want plumbers, bankers, factory workers, & fry cooks to pay for it, we need to be providing something in return.

That can be enrollments, or majors, or public engagement or some mix...