12,001 ants @not12001ants - Tumblr Blog

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, vatican city should be forced to participate in eurovision

The amount of slavery in Ancient Rome was legitimately terrifying tbh

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.

emperor-gaozu-of-han

getting followed by porn bots is weird and that’s coming from a guy with multiple 🥵 concubines

emperor-gaozu-of-han

this is really resonating with the subjects

qin-shi-huang-di

step aside you old cut-sleeve, i shall court these maidens!

emperor-gaozu-of-han

I’m an emperor actually @chasingtheskyline

qin-shi-huang-di

the marquis of homo WISHES he had a fraction of my imperial glory!

emperor-gaozu-of-han

right so i’m one of the most well regarded emperors in the history of china and you’re the guy who had to put “shut up about the mercury” in his bio

qin-shi-huang-di

I AM NOT OWNED! I AM NOT OWNED!!!

I AM A GLORIOUS EMPEROR, I CAN EARN THE LOVE OF MY CITIZENS!

I AM A GLORIOUS EMPEROR, I CAN ADEQUATELY PREPARE MY SUCCESSOR!

I AM A GLORIOUS EMPEROR, I CAN ESTABLISH A STABLE DYNASTY!

diet-poison

the Terracotta Army guy?

qin-shi-huang-di

🙄 you build ONE funerary complex with 8000 life-sized statues of soldiers, horses and generals and suddenly you’re “the terracotta army guy.” 🙄 execution.

slimlimit

Stumbling across this makes me feel like a dad whos walked into their kids room beer in hand and seeing them roleplay starwars fights i do not belong here but god its entertaining

emperor-gaozu-of-han

to be clear in this scenario im the jedi and im winning

radgepacket-deactivated20241030

big day today

buryymeinblack

queued for the next wednesday the 12th

buryymeinblack

happy wednesday the 12th everyone

whitepeopletwitter

It’s the same feeling

sivavakkiyar

August 6th

sivavakkiyar

August 9th

beggars-opera

The tailors at Colonial Williamsburg made a suit for their cat

vinceaddams

The best part is that they were inspired by a diary entry from 1775, written by a 12 year old tailor’s apprentice who had been left unsupervised all day and decided to make a suit for a cat. Here’s a link to the blog post about it, but I’ll just paste the whole diary entry here:

“I had been at work about two months when Christmas came on – and here I must relate a little anecdote. The principal [the tailor] and his lady were invited to a party among their friends…while it devolved on me to stay at home and keep house. There was nothing left me in charge to do, only to take care of the house. There was a large cat that generally lay about the fire. In order to try my mechanical powers, I concluded to make a suit of clothing for puss, and for my purpose gathered some scraps of cloth that lay about the shop-board, and went to work as hard as I could. Late in the evening I got my suit of clothes finished; I caught the cat, put on the whole suit – coat, vest, and small-clothes [breeches] – buttoned all on tight, and set down my cat to inspect the fit.

“Unfortunately for me there was a hole through the floor close to the fireplace, just large enough for the cat to pass down; after making some efforts to get rid of the clothes, and failing, pussy descended through the hole and disappeared; the floor was tight and the house underpinned with brick, so there was no chance of pursuit. I consoled myself with a hope that the cat would extricate itself from its incumbrance, but not so; night came and I had made on a good fire and seated myself for some two or three hours after dark, when who should make their appearance but my master and mistress and two young men, all in good humor, with two or three bottles of rum. After all were seated around the fire, who should appear amongst us but the cat in his uniform. I was struck speechless, the secret was out and had no chance of concealing; the cat was caught, the whole work inspected and the question asked, is this your day’s work? I was obliged to answer in the affirmative; I would then have been willing to take a good whipping, and let it stop there, but no, to complete my mortification the clothes were carefully taken off the cat and hung up in the shop for the inspection of all customers that came in.”

derinthescarletpescatarian

“I was hoping they’d beat me and forget about it but to my horror they stuck my work up on the fridge”

zackbuildit

Not just any fridge-

The public fridge

obscuresymbolism

I just feel like we're not talking enough about the pro-labor, pro-union, themes in Hadestown. My boy Orpheus is literally wearing a red bandana. He said you simply have to stand up, together, even when it's terrifying and you have never done it before. There are more of us than them. Even if it seems impossible we have hope, because we are standing in solidarity. You can only make demands of gods if you have your union behind you. And then you realise they aren't gods, and you can bargain.

i-am-a-fish

I'm going to go to sleep in my bed for 400 hours

snototter

A Formosan white-headed flying squirrel (Petaurista alborufus lena) in Taiwan

by Dash Huang

dozydawn

nimble, a border collie-papillon mix, wins the 12” class in the 2024 masters agility championship. the first time a mixed breed has won at westminster ever.

ch40s0w1

context explaining why the announcer is screaming, this is supposed to take a high level competitive agility dog 40 seconds

sandersstudies

This video makes me cry every time it’s on my dash and I can’t even iterate why.

Like the dog doesn’t even know it’s a competition and she’s made history. She(?) just is happy and knows she made her owner happy too.

solely-ashes

The face of a being with only a wind storm between their ears, moments before unleashing it unto the world

severeprincesheep

always a pleasure to see this girl on my dashboard

herowyn

5 0 Y E A R S A G O

closetocanada

Happy Moon Landing Day! ❤️👩‍🚀🌛

madmonksandmaenads

I wish I could make white people(and not just white Americans) understand how diverse the pre-columbian Americas were. The history, religion, culture, politics was at least as complex as Europe's. There was the full gamut of religions, from monotheists to animists to ancestral religions. There were city building empires, village farmers, nomadic traders, and so many other ways to live. This is all just based on what we know, the fragments left behind and the stories of survivors of an apocalyptic plague. All this before the most extended campaign of genocide in history was waged in an attempt to wipe out those survivors.

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

Do you understand how much poorer our whole species is because of it? Can you imagine where art, religion, and science would be if we still had these vast bodies of knowledge? The stain of the colonial project will never be fully washed clean. We owe more than just the land to those we stole from. We owe them a whole future, a future that could have been brighter for all of us. If only greed and fear weren't allowed to rule this land.