I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
Every time I tell myself to chill and that there’s no approaching civil war some shit like this has to happen
first the federal government hires mercenaries (contracted military forces/“contractors”)
now individuals in the state government are doing it.
this is NOT GOOD this is NOT NORMAL
you hire mercenaries to fight a war, not for security
Smells like brownshirts to me
Do you think the III%ers have enough self-awareness to feel weird about literally being hired by the government they’ve pledged to resist?
They see no contradictions at all. Ideological purity is for leftists, which is why we are so fragmented and without teeth. If we actually did have clout… we’d never have allowed this to happen. Most of these fools are just adults raised on reactionary propaganda of the Reagan and Bush eras suffering under Neoliberal syncreticism so they don’t even realize they’re working for the harbingers of their own demise. The corporate state will use them like they did the Pinkertons. Now, go back and read some history. What was the response from the left back then? It definitely wasn’t sitting on their asses reblogging bullshit. Instead they were in the streets, creating alliances and striking to make their voices heard. In this echo chamber of ineffectual illusions whatever we say is pointless if it isn’t met with physical irl actions.
You also misunderstand: libertarians aren’t anarchists, they’re small government authoritarians. They love government, just as long as they have the reigns to do what they want without principle.
Somewhere a rocket scientist brain surgeon physicist with a knack for economics who wears Velcro shoes is having a stress breakdown.
When I was a professional ballroom dance instructor, one of my coworkers was having a tough time teaching a step to her student. As he gets more frustrated she tells him “it’s ok- you’ll get it- this isn’t rocket science.”
There is an awkward pause as her student stares back at her. “No” he agrees, “this isn’t rocket science. That I can do. This is some sadistic step designed specifically to torture rocket scientists.”
And that’s how we found out he worked for NASA.
Reblogged for that story
Your daily reminder that no, seriously: “difficult” is a matter of context.
Not just money. I think it’s also much more about this psychology of threatened domination. People who believe it will harm their liberty for other people to have full citizenship and be able to work together to govern society. And that somehow that goes much deeper than money to me. It’s hard to find the right words for it, but it’s a whole way of being in the world and seeing others. Assuming one’s right to dominate.
TIL that a mob from a nearby county threatened to lynch Black newspaper editor John Mitchell Jr. for writing an editorial condemning a lynching. Armed with two pistols, he then traveled to that same county to report on the lynching on-site.
Another early case Mitchell reported was the murder of a black man named Banks by a white officer named Priddy. Mitchell declared the officer guilty of murder and was summoned to the grand jury. He was indited for making such a charge, but the case was dropped. He sought to have the body exhumed and examined, as he had heard a report that Banks was beaten to death. When he went to the mortuary where the body was at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, he was locked in the mortuary and had to escape and hurry back to Richmond to make an appointment in the courts the next morning. The officer was not convicted or punished.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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