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...

One of the (many) grim ironies of fascism is that fascists are deeply concerned about the aesthetics of military power and masculinity, but ideologically incapable of doing things which actually produce military power.

A lot of time parading in uniform, but suck at war.

https://twitter.com/Bartaway/status/1844158665399701539

I wrote in some more detail here () on how much fascists tend to suck at war.acoup.blog/2024/02/23/fir…

One of the responses this thread got, a few times, ran roughly "if magic is common, magicians become engineers" or variations of that theme - the assumption that magic would be rapidly systematized by fictional pre-modern societies.

And I don't think this is right. 1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1841518674953265363

Its an understandable but incorrect modern assumption to assume that basically all knowledge is scientific in nature.

But human beings have experienced matter, energy and chemicals for hundreds of thousands of years.

Physics and chemistry are far younger. 2/

One of the substantial errors, in my mind, in fantasy writing, is the idea that 'magic' has to be forced to follow either 1) a parallel system of physics or 2) a logical rules-based system.

I'd argue instead that magic systems ought to be *thematically relevant* & *consistent.*

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1841467490964017448

In the Lord of the Rings, magical power is connected to knowledge - Gandalf doesn't have 'mana,' or access to a parallel physics, but he was present when the world was sung into being and so knows things you do not about how it functions on a spiritual level.

So one of the retorts to this is to argue that this fails to consider 'cultural compatibility' of some sort - 'sure *some* people fit well in Rome's empire, but that's because they were 'similar' to the Romans.

This is also pretty obviously wrong, once one gets to details. 1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1840053286272901440

Of course such 'cultural compatibility' arguments often reduce down to thinly veiled racism - 'compatible' cultures are the ones imagined to be white.

That bigotry has a long history in the scholarship, most notably Haverfield, The Romanization of Roman Britain (1905). 2/

I suppose we're doing this again.

This is incorrect: the Roman army relied heavily on non-citizens throughout nearly the whole of Roman history, including the periods of its greatest success in the third and second centuries, when Rome came to dominate the Mediterranean. 1/ Indeed, Roman armies were at least half non-citizen for most of Roman history.

I've discussed this in more detail on the blog (link below) but let's do the basic details, so that you can be better informed than the manchild that owns this website. 2/
acoup.blog/2021/06/25/col…

One of the common misperceptions about ancient armies was that ancient soldiers were all Super Buff and as a result, ancient military equipment was very heavy.

So how heavy was ancient military kit (not as heavy as you think!) - a thread! 1/ We need to make a key distinction here right at the start between a *combat* load (the weight of the equipment you'd carry into to a fight) and a *marching* load that a soldier would carry on the march.

Obviously, the latter is heavier, including lots of supplies and such. 2/

One thing I think is important about this sustained attack - Vance is *still* tweeting about it - on Haitians in Ohio, is that it puts the lie to everything a certain sort of immigration restrictionist said they wanted.

"Oh, we just want them to come here legally"

They did!! 1/ These folks in Springfield *are* here legally, under Temporary Protected Status.

"Oh, but they need to be working, not leeching off of social services."

They are! Local business leaders say they work harder than many long-time residents! 2/

I want to talk a bit about how historians go about understanding historical cultures and worldviews.

History, after all, is more than just dates and names, more than who did what to who when.

A good historian can, to a degree, inhabit the worldview of their subjects. But how?1/ The danger, of course, is importing our assumptions and values without realizing when trying to understand our historical subjects and what they might have been thinking.

This mistake is a pervasive problem in older (pre-1920s or so) scholarship and some modern enthusiasts. 2/

Sigh.

Ok, so for one, it is: ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς
(Plut. Mor. 241f)*
"With this or on this."
Because Plutarch wrote in Greek and not in Latin.

His Latin isn't even a precise translation, as Plutarch leaves out the world shield (though that is the sense). 1/ Funnily enough, a Latin author - Valerius Maximus (first cent. AD) - does mention this saying, but phrases it differently, ""monebantur ut aut vivi cum armis in conspectum earum venirent aut mortui in armis referrentur." (Val. Max. 2.7e.2) 2/

So @_Dragases_ has provided some good additions to this list (I'll link his thread at the end) but I wanted to as well.

The issue with this list is that it is all emperors and generals - you will come away knowing a lot of events, but little of Roman society or culture. 1/

https://twitter.com/mcgillmd921/status/1824195420593197454

First off, being a 'Romanophile' is not the right way to approach any sort of history.

As I've said before, I find the Romans endearing, but as a student or scholar of Roman history, your goal has to be to understand them.

Sometimes you will like what you see, sometimes not! 2/

Worldbuilding/history chatter: the Nights Watch from ASoIaF/GoT/HotD don't actually make a lot of sense.

The basic problem here isn't fantasy at all: how to keep a permanent security presence on a distant and potentially inhospitable border is an old problem. 1/ And because it is an old problem that recurs a lot, there are historical patterns for how it is solved.

The main problem is not how to generate the force, so much as how to keep it on the frontier (rather than either dissolving into the peasantry or marching on the capital). 2/

Been playing a bit of Total War: Pharaoh Dynasties, which is basically Total War: Late Bronze Age, covering the Aegean, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt and Mesopotamia.

It's particularly interesting to see the fudges they have to make to fit bronze age warfare into total war. 1/ Because there are a lot of fudges here, for instance taking very rare, probably royal heavy armor (like the Dendra panoply) and imagining whole units of it, or pulling Assyrian cavalry forward a few centuries to fit into the game's time frame. 2/