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Roy Profile picture
Roy
@royllovians
Atomized millennial • Homosexual male • Abolish progressivism • Carceral urbanism
Dec 8 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is like saying "Lincoln Cathedral is older than the Ming Dynasty." A vacuous triviality that only sounds revelatory if you don't know anything about Mesoamerican history. The Aztecs were not ancient; they were a very "modern" state that hearkened back to ancient forebears. I enjoy Crémieux's content, but almost everything in that thread is just bait for ignorant RW accounts to gloat about history. Harvard is older than Hasidic Judaism? Wow, I'm just hearing this now. Next you'll tell me that the College of William & Mary is older than Methodism.
Nov 2 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Deserving of a more thorough discussion, but:
- Yom Kippur is not about kapparot
- A substantial number of Orthodox Jews have always rejected kapparot
- Kapparot is not supposed to be a sacrifice
- You are not supposed to believe your sins are literally transferred to the chicken It's supposed to be a charitable act in which a chicken or money is given to the poor, with the idea of the offering as a "substitute" being a purely symbolic reflection on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Nonetheless, many rabbis have historically rejected it as a superstition.
Oct 25 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
There are lots of comparisons to make between the systems established after the Spanish and Islamic conquests, but I think what made the Islamic system different—and in my opinion, worse—was the abjection and oppression of the supposedly "protected" dhimmi communities. Obviously with variation across time and place, but across the sweep of history the dhimma system contrived to subject those who resisted or deferred conversion to Islam to humiliation, ruin, and ever-further diminishment.
Oct 19 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
In Greece's defense, this was a mutual ethnic cleansing with Turkey brokered by international powers at the Lausanne Conference—Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, decided that population exchange was the only viable solution. My understanding is that if the 1947 Palestine partition plan had been carried out, there would have been internationally-sanctioned relocation of Arabs from the Jewish state to the Arab state. But the flight and expulsion that actually happened was far more violent and lawless.
Oct 17 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
An interesting thing is that the "reification" of writing over spoken language exaggerates the discontinuity between Old English and Middle/Modern English. Everyone in England spoke the same language the day after Hastings as before— —and there's no evidence that language change proceeded at an unusual pace after the Norman conquest. Nobody on the ground would have noticed their language "becoming Middle English", even with a steady and increasing adoption of French and Latin loanwords.
Oct 16 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Particularly unconvincing is the argument that "Some notion of 'nation' existed in the past, but because people often prioritized regional, local, or religious identities before it, that means it was completely and totally different from what we call 'nations' today." Because, well, firstly... That's still true today! Nation ("country") *still* isn't the most important identity to many people in modern nation-states, even if you limit your consideration to geographically-based identities! Image
Oct 15 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I'm told that pre-modern notions of nation were nothing like modern nations. But Anthony Kaldellis says the medieval Romans were a nation and considered their politeia the national state of the Roman people—so put that in your "consensus of all serious scholarship" and smoke it. Image According to Anthony Kaldellis, the medieval Romans conceived of themselves as a nation and an ethnos, marked by distinctive speech, ancestry, dress, cuisine, and habits, as well as their own religion, even if it was one they shared with some other peoples.
Sep 24 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The analogy between biological and linguistic evolution is far from perfect, and I think one thing that trips people up is that, while some biological phyla remain relatively "the same" for extremely long periods of time, this doesn't really happen with languages. So I think when some people ask whether one language is "older" than another, they are expecting something like insects, which have existed in more or less recognizable form for at least 300 million years, vs. mammals, of much more recent origin.
Sep 22 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The social mingling of men and women—including mixed dancing—is a cornerstone of Western culture, dating back to the customs of the early Germanic peoples, and a key part of what differentiates us from Islam and the East with their culturally stifling sex segregation.
Image Social mingling of men and women gave us courtly love, the Enlightenment salon, great literature like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the occasions for which perhaps the majority of all classical music was written, from Lully's tragédies en musique to the waltzes of Strauss.
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Sep 14 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
A major contributor to the lack of trust in the immigration system in both Europe and the US is the deliberate obfuscation of legal vs. illegal and refugee vs. non-refugee status, which, very conveniently, makes it almost impossible to discuss the issue in accurate terms. The Haitians in Springfield have Temporary Protected Status, which is not the same as asylum. It is literally temporary in nature. But the Haitians are obviously not there "temporarily"—they are there to revitalize the town and a Democratic admin won't be sending them back.
Sep 13 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Truly a naïve and Western-brained view to assume that a typical Palestinian or other Arab would recognize the resistance against the Zionists as having anything to do with something they consider a shame and a humiliation—a corrupting deviance exploited by the Jews, even. Image They're assuming that all "oppressed people" are primed to accept "the unity of all oppressions", gay and trans rights, etc, but there's just some extraneous thing called "bigotry"—almost a literal physical object—causing a blockage in their brains keeping it from coming together
Sep 8 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Exciting news from 2020. Apparently a compelling account of the origin of the templatic morphology of the Afro-Asiatic languages (which include Semitic, Egyptian, and Berber, among others) has been out for a while. Looking forward to digging into this. Image Wilson takes note of the sporadic claims that Coptic survived as a spoken language in certain pockets of Upper Egypt into the 19th or 20th centuries or even the present day. He says he is "agnostic" on these claims, but to me it is obvious that they are completely apocryphal. Image
Sep 1 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Imagining an honest, genuinely inquisitive move to link the medieval to the "diverse" in historical linguistics—e.g. a study that examines to what degree British and American dialects preserve the morphological distinction between Old English -ing vs.-ende (today's -ing vs. -in) A redundant exercise, because linguistics is already inherently "diverse" in that it involves the study of difference and demands that you analyze human phenomena on their own terms—but nonetheless, wondering what it would mean if calls for "diversity" were made in good faith
Aug 25 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Something that slightly bothers me is how the adjective "High" in language names is often misunderstood—and often used, in the names of fictional languages—to mean "high class", "high status", "refined", etc. This originates from two different places. The traditional dialect continuum of continental Germanic is divided into Low, Middle, and High German—a terminology that refers to elevation, like Upper and Lower Egypt. Low German is spoken on the plains by the North Sea and Baltic.
Aug 20 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Jfc. 166k likes for a blisteringly awful misrepresentation of history. Medieval cathedrals and other buildings were quite famously built by free, paid, skilled craftsmen belonging to guilds, which were something vaguely akin to modern-day unions. Also more likely than not the tweet is just inspired by dumb Monty Python "hitting boards on head" depictions of a miserable Middle Ages, but to be more cynical I feel like it's kind of selling a "We built these streets!" third worldist "African slaves in medieval Europe" message
Jul 27 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
What's more, when we were discussing how few Indians and Asians were in the area, I mentioned the lack of a local Jewish community—and he admitted he had no idea if or how Jews and Christians were different, and that most people in India had no idea, either. I explained that the main difference between Jews and Christians is that Jews don't worship Jesus—which I know is a terribly reductive way to put it, but if you're navigating American society and want to avoid a religious faux pas, it's probably the first thing you ought to know.
Jul 2 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Thomistic Cowboy
Thomistic Minuteman
Thomist on Bunker Hill
Thomistic Pilgrim
Thomistic Frontiersman
Thomistic Jacksonian
Marian Goodwife
Thomistic Annie Oakley Basically all of the charm and American-ness of American Catholicism lies in how it's defined by old-time aristocratic colonial cultures or intensely prole-coded immigrant cultures
Jun 11 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Lmao. Someone on Reddit wanted the /r/askhistorians take on my Middle East thread.

They assume that I am a "Western Supremacist" because, uh...? Very much "Your claims are false because you are X, and you are X because you made those claims" Image I don't think I ever said that the people of Islamic Egypt or Mesopotamia didn't think of themselves as the *physical descendants* of ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. I mean, maybe they did, maybe they didn't—I'm not informed on that.
Jun 11 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Also, public service announcement: Please stop using "Bantu" as a synonym for "black African." It makes you sound like an idiot with a degree in race science from Twitter university. Image I'm really sorry to everyone involved but it is simply the case that linguistic categories are not isomorphic with genetic categories.
Jun 11 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The "North Africans could have been black" thing is truly desperate and terribly annoying; the historians who do it will beg and plead with audiences to consider such-and-such individual North Africans who might be perceived as black by contemporary Americans... ...No matter that modern-day Arab and Berber North Africans consider themselves completely distinct populations from black Africans, and nobody in the US or anywhere else thinks of North African countries as "black countries".
Jun 11 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Georgia and Armenia are the main geopolitical remnants of a formerly much more widespread Christian civilization in western Asia but they're often shunted into the cultural or even racial category of "European" or "White" just to simplify things The same goes with Greeks tbh. Like, the classification of the eastern Aegean islands as "European" is clearly political in nature, and Cyprus is obviously part of Asia. The ancient and medieval Greeks who lived in the interior of Asia Minor were certainly not "European".