LORD AND SAVIOR @megalomaniatron - Tumblr Blog

MEGATRON* *choose your fighter!

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WRITTEN BY SAMSA!

#[ooc] moon above #so many bad boys so little time

paper-wounds

“Give me some work to do. Something with my servos. I abhor this… sitting and doing nothing.”

#[00] unspecified

what-even-is-thiss

The amount of slavery in Ancient Rome was legitimately terrifying tbh

what-even-is-thiss

Y’all know that I’m into ancient Roman history and I do a lot of research on it but even though I should be used to it by now sometimes I read an anecdote about how an individual slave was treated and I’m hit with the realization that like a third of the population was living like that and I just need to put my head in my hands for a second

what-even-is-thiss

Emperor Hadrian randomly stabbed a slave in the eye in a fit of rage and he was supposedly unusually sympathetic to slaves.

There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.

And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.

People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.

Like how many people throughout history were beaten to death because some rich asshole was angry and there was no legal or social consequences for doing so? We don’t know.

what-even-is-thiss

When you study ancient history you’re reminded that slavery has never once been kind or justified. It just takes on different forms of evil in every time and place that it infects.

what-even-is-thiss

Chattel slavery is an incredibly cruel and dehumanizing system.

So is every other kind of slavery.

This doesn’t diminish the awfulness of what people were forced to endure under chattel slavery.

I just think it’s useful to remember that cruelty is complicated and diverse and just because a cruel system is different doesn’t make it right by any means.

Roman slavery operated differently from slavery in the antebellum American south which operated differently from slavery in the Ottoman Empire which operated differently from modern prisoner chain gangs.

All of these are still slavery. They’re all cruel and unacceptable. Their diversity does not matter. Their willing participants have still committed the crime of taking away the self ownership and personhood of another human being.

penrosesun

My dad is a high school physics teacher, and every year he does an incredibly valuable and deeply uncomfortable exercise with his students to drive home why “the Industrial Revolution” was called that:

In the unit about physical work, he points out that work is, at its core, a measurement of labor, and that labor which isn’t done by a paid laborer had another name before the rise of automation: slavery. He has his students quantify the amount of physical work that you might expect out of a human slave, and then sets them to work calculating what that means for their own standard of living. If you wanted to live like you currently do in the ancient world, how many slaves would you need? Calculate your washing machine in slaves. Calculate your dishwasher in slaves. Calculate your refrigerator and your TV and your HVAC in slaves.

And then he asks them to think about those calculations every time they read about any form of wealth at any point in history prior to the Industrial Revolution, and to ask themselves how many slaves went into creating and supporting that wealth. Sometimes it’s chattel slavery, and sometimes it’s serfs, and sometimes it’s forced marriages, or debt bondage, or penal labor… but scratch the surface of wealth and civilization and leisure time throughout history, and you inevitably find slavery hiding underneath. Sometimes (often) you still find slavery hiding underneath, even in the modern day – but until automation, it’s a virtual guarantee about any culture with a high standard of living at all.

He's sitting at the very far end of the bar at Swerve's, nursing a lukewarm cube of pure coolant and looking... marginally more miserable and long-suffering than he usually does.

That's probably fine.

#[02] idw

skobbeloff

haha hey guys who's up for some kawaii group bonding haha

zorangezest

one morbillion dollars faxed to your bank acc IMMEDIATELY

velliememes

Send 💋 to give my muse a kiss

Add 'reverse' to have my muse kiss yours

#kiss the grump #[ooc] prompts #If you don’t tell me which bucket you’re kissing I WILL pick the worst option (bayhem)

………….he could.

Should he, though?

#Orion……………….#[ic] all along the watchtower #[06] tfo

“Yes, we’ve had one conquest. But what about a second conquest?”

#[05] prime #Daddy shark looking at the Eye of Terror like yeah I could take that #Cadia broke before the guardsmen did etc etc etc but have you considered giant toy robot

canthaveshitingotham-crucified

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

canthaveshitingotham-crucified

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling