Cripple. History Major. Irritable and in constant pain. Vaguely Left-Wing.

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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • Flavius Stilicho, who was one of the last competent generals in the West (only beaten out a generation later by Aetius, and then a decade after him, Emperor Majorian, the former killed by court intrigue, the latter by a military coup), was the caretaker of the Emperor Honorius when he was young, and later his father-in-law when Honorius was married to Stilicho’s daughter. Stilicho was half-Vandal by birth, but was educated and raised as a Roman, and served the Empire with absolute devotion, even under the short-tempered Emperor Theodosius, whom he made his career under. Raised for his talents to the command of the armies of the Western Empire, he managed to repel multiple barbarian incursions even with the extremely limited and steadily-draining resources of the Western Empire, and was widely celebrated for this.

    However, prejudices against him for being half-barbarian persisted, and jealousy over his successes made him many enemies in the blinkered, backstabbing, hyper-aristocratic court of the Late Empire. Furthermore, he was blamed for a renewed incursion of Germanic tribes over the weakened German border despite not really having the resources to address every crisis in the Empire at once, and when he convinced the Senate to pay for peace to buy the Empire’s forces time to prepare, he made more enemies still. He was soon after arrested and executed with the complicity of Honorius, his own son-in-law and former ward. Thousands of barbarian or half-barbarian troops who had faithfully served the Empire were also killed or driven out during this purge, with many joining, out of spite and vengeance, that same Germanic incursion which saw little reason to comply with a peace treaty with a state actively involved in destroying itself.

    Two years after Stilicho’s death, that incursion sacked the city of Rome.

    Oops.





  • Explanation: In the tumultuous Late Empire, sometimes, being a completely incompetent, easily manipulated figurehead is safer than actually doing anything for the good of the Roman people. The Emperor Honorius managed to reign over a rapidly declining Western Empire, seeing the city of Rome sacked for the first time in almost a thousand years, one of the last competent generals in the West executed by court intrigues, and the near-total collapse of the territorial integrity of the Western Empire.

    But at least his favorite chicken (also named Rome) was not lost when the city fell!





  • PugJesusOPMtoA Comm for HistorymemesWisdom of General Tubman o7
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    18 hours ago

    Explanation: Harriett Tubman was an anti-slavery partisan who led dozens of people out of slavery in the pre-war American South. During the American Civil War, she assisted the (eventually) antislavery Union as a scout and spy, and, posthumously, was granted the rank of Brigadier General by the Maryland National Guard.








  • PugJesusOPMtoA Comm for HistorymemesThanks Reagan, you fuckwit
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    1 day ago

    Firms driven by transient investors act as entities independent from society entirely. Each one is focused only on maximizing profit to please investors; the investors, likewise, are only interested in the next quarter, because at any given time they can take their investment and sell it. They are simultaneously putting money into renewables, but only insofar as it is profitable; as long as fossil fuels (still the larger portion of energy generation in most places) are more profitable, they will put more money into it. A self-feeding cycle which starves renewables.

    The thing that is sometimes misunderstood by a disdain for the owner class is the incoherence of the owner class. They don’t make plans. Even their alignments are only because of common interests (such as ‘let the ultrawealthy investors make more money from their shitty investments’), not ideology or long-term plans.




  • I don’t remember the names of most interchangeable tankie fuckwads, but I presume, from the mention of NCD, that this is the one that opted to call the Tiananmen Square massacre as perpetrated by “CIA militants” fighting with the glorious PLA who were only heroically defending themselves against Amerikkkan aggression.

    “Socialists are routinely assassinated”

    Damn, is it 1970 again?

    The simping for propaganda and totalitarian surveillance of the population is amusing, in a grim, dark, “Fascists are so fucking braindead” kind of way.