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From my review of Gladiator II in Taki’s Magazine:
… Denzel is quite good as the Iago-like villain Macrinus (in real life, Macrinus was a Caucasian North African, not a sub-Saharan African, who had Caracalla assassinated and briefly became Roman Emperor before losing his throne to the transgender Heliogabalus, who sounds like he would make a lurid bad guy for Scott’s planned Gladiator III). Denzel plots to take over Rome, or destroy it trying, as vengeance for Marcus Aurelius having been his slave owner long ago in Africa. (In Roman literature, former slaves make the most vicious slave owners.)
Two weeks ago I argued that it wasn’t ridiculous to imagine that an exceptional black could rise to a position of power broker in the Roman Empire. For instance, Pushkin’s great-grandfather Abram Petrovich Gannibal, an extraordinarily clever sub-Saharan slave, became a czarist general under Peter the Great and the ancestor of much of Britain’s current aristocracy.
Nonetheless, [spoiler alert] the 69-year-old Denzel makes an anticlimactic Final Boss for the hero to fight at the end.
Emperor Caracalla
I think the complex story could have been simplified by dropping Denzel’s conniving character completely and instead focusing more on how the heroic gladiator and the heroic general overcome their differences to team up to fight a more realistically formidable version of the emperor Caracalla, who would make a more plausible Final Boss.
Caracalla died in real life being assassinated by his own soldier when attacking Persia. Scott could have made that the moral of the movie: Don’t start a needless war with Persia.
Sounds timely.
Unfortunately, the sequel’s obsession with the glamor of royal descent contradicts the ostensible anti-dynastic pro–Roman Republic ideology of the two movies.
Read the whole thing there.
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Indeed.
Thanks for mentioning that.
You’ve got one thing wrong, Steve.
Surely, if a Gladiator III was made, and it featured Elgabalus, he would, of course, be portrayed as the ultimate good guy and hero.
After all, which other historical figure so neatly encapsulates, in a single personage, the ultimate in today’s celebrated lefty, woke, Democrat Party, NYT “values” ?
OT: “Did America Avoid Big Steal II, or Get It in a Way She Never Expected?”
https://webcommentary.com/php/ShowArticle.php?id=stixn&date=241204
Yesterday, USAF A10 ground attack planes were supporting the Syrian “moderate rebels”.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/10-warthog-getting-job-done-syria-213952
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3983858/centcom-destroys-threatening-weapons-systems-in-syria/
PS – the most read story on Guardian UK is about Eminem’s mum dying.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/04/us-china-microchips-export-bans-gallium-germanium
Caracalla murdered his younger brother Geta in their mother’s arms as she tried in vain to protect him. Afterward he became convinced that the crime of fratricide had brought the curse of the gods on him, and he traveled to the holy cities in the realm seeking absolution and healing from the psychosomatic disorders he developed. In the famous Roman style of uncompromisingly realistic portraiture, you can see the imprint of his inner darkness as his features coarsen from a young prince to a cruel tyrant. At least they didn’t try to portray him as a negro in the movie, like some now cast his father Septimius Severus, who was of a noble Italian family that settled in North Africa. His mother, the Syrian Julia Domna, wife, mother, and grandmother of emperors, was one of the most powerful women in history, but her story remains untold.
Gladiator II has the same relation to what ancient Rome was really like as the Dune movies do. Scott’s movies are very entertaining fairy tales but complete nonsense as history.
HBO’s Rome was far better, at least that series captured some of the essential foreigness to modern sensibilities of what ancient Rome was like. The Lucius Vorenus character – a strong stoic man of duty and honor, was far closer to the Roman ideal of manhood than Maximus. Although the Vorenus of the television series would probably have been viewed as a little too sweet on his wife for Roman tastes. Also Pullo would have given Maximus a nice beat down if they had ever met.
An Egger’s take on Rome has a lot of potential. A view of Rome that doesn’t cater to modern sensibilities at all would not be very commercial though.
It is interesting that the Gladiator movies would be so succesful in our supposedly Christian nation. 1950s takes on Rome tended to still remember, or at least give lip service to the notion, that ancient Rome was the original enemy of Christianity. Christianity gained popularity so quickly precisely because most people lived like shit back then and Christianity offered hope to the downtrodden and the promise of a world where softer virtues like charity, kindness, humility and temperance were important, not the virtues that Maximus embodies. My sense is that a historically accurate movie about Christian martyrs in the 3rd century, or female hellenized Jews proselytizing the Good Word of Christ to slaves and menial laborers, would probably be box office poison. And ironically would be condemned as too “woke” by a lot of self proclaimed Christians.
It’s odd that no one seems to notice that Rome was built on slavery in a way that the US certainly was not. And yet we don’t see mobs tearing down statues of ancient Romans.
Caracalla’s mother was a Syrian Arab and his father was partly Southern European and partly North African. So he was probably pretty swarthy. In the movie, he and his brother Geta are extremely pale, like Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. The movie’s conception of the two brothers is fairly entertaining, but it would work better in a different genre. This one requires the hero to fight the final boss in the climax, so this one would have worked better with a more realistic Caracalla.
Thank you.
I have similar feelings about the Trump appointments. From Peak Stupidity:
https://peakstupidity.com/index.php?post=3138
Two of the greatest purveyors of all things Roman in the English speaking world of the 20th century were the writer/poet Robert Graves, and the doyen of 20th century classicists, Michael Grant, who incidentally cooperated in the Penguin books translation of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius.
Of course, Robert Graves is well known for authoring I Claudius, which was subsequently adapted by the BBC, and ‘Claudius the God’.
One particularly noteworthy passage from Claudius the God, which has stuck in my mind these past decades is the colorful description of the strange and baffling disease, unknown to modern medical science, which afflicted King Herod the Great:
“He was afflicted by the distemper called ‘Herod’s Evil’.
The symptoms were corpse-like breath, a putrescent stomach, an incessant watery flow from the bowels and maggots breeding in the privy member”.
For best effect, one must imagine that great English character actor Michael Hordern wearing the purple tinged toga of a senator speaking in grave Oxford tones speaking these words full on to camera. Now, that is the essence of the classical world.
If race-blind HBD worked as a social/political program, we would live in a world ruled by Middle Eastern countries. The smartest most capable Arabs, whites, blacks, Kurds, etc. would have risen to the top and had big harems and bred a multiracial superpower.
“Denzel is quite good as the Iago-like villain Macrinus”
“Unfortunately, the sequel’s obsession with the glamor of royal descent contradicts the ostensible anti-dynastic pro–Roman Republic ideology of the two movies. ”
LOL yeah and I’d say having a negro play the part of a Roman man contradicts history and reality.
But the point is to rewrite history, and to rewrite historic literature and other forms of art, to fool people into believing negroes (and other non whites) building nations and culture in the Western world was factual.
OT but a UK investment bank’s 2023 “Outrageous Predictions” are interesting.
No WW3 though, not outrageous enough?
https://www.home.saxo/en-gb/insights/news-and-research/thought-leadership/outrageous-predictions
Since Rome is the state of mind, it is a waste of time to nitpick about historical accuracy (except when a visually clearly different actor, of African or east Asian racial type” plays a role of a Caucasian).
It’s a good point as long as you consider that the equivalent of “Persia” for the modern USA is China, not Iran. Modern Iran is to the US Empire what German tribes across the Rhine were for the Romans.
“Caracalla died in real life being assassinated by his own soldier when attacking Persia. Scott could have made that the moral of the movie: Don’t start a needless war with Persia.“
There was another later Roman Emperor that was captured while invading Persia. The Persians tortured and humiliated him for years, with the Persian ruler going as far as using him as a human footstool. Finally they killed him by pouring molten gold down his throat. Sounds like a befitting end for some of our own warmongers.
Sessions was a great Senator and a great AG in many respects, and I wish Trump hadn’t canned him–but, at the same time, I can’t entirely blame Trump for his frustration with Sessions, since Sessions made the fatal mistake of taking the “Russia Russia Russia” nonsense seriously enough to recuse himself and allow Rod Rosenstein to implement the bogus “collusion” investigation that did so much damage during Trump’s first term. Trump understandably expected the AG to have his back, and when the AG instead stepped aside and allowed his own department to institute a witch hunt against the President–well, I don’t blame the President for being disappointed. In retrospect, it would have been better to have put Sessions in at DHS, where he could have focused on immigration, and installed a less scrupulous attack dog like Giuliani at DoJ instead, but Sessions supposedly told Trump that he preferred the AG post. Trump’s reasoning with Bondi is clearly that “she actively supported me during the 2020 ‘stop the steal’ chaos, so she’ll be a loyalist and protect me from another witch hunt. ” I don’t know if that’s truly the case or not, but I can at least follow the reasoning for the choice of Bondi; Noem is the one that makes no sense to me, since her loyalty hasn’t been nearly as clearly demonstrated as Bondi’s. As for Kobach, I also wish that Trump would hire him for something, but at the same time I think he can probably do a lot of good where he is now, as AG of Kansas. Paxton in Texas has shown just how much a state AG can accomplish on the immigration and other fronts.
The account I read had it that Macrinus, who among his other duties was in charge of imperial correspondence, intercepted a letter to Caracalla in which he, Macrinus, was denounced as a traitor who was plotting the assassination of the Emperor. Knowing that even the mere accusation of treason was taken as proof by the paranoid Caracalla, he reasoned that his only way to survive was to have him murdered and claim the purple for himself.
I guess it worked. For a while. Being a 3rd century Roman Emperor didn’t offer a lot of job security.
No, Commodus killed Marcus Aurelius by hugging him too hard against his chest and smothering him. People die easy in the movies. That was when I stopped watching it.
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I can’t watch a black playing a Roman. Destroys it for me, not that I like gay gladiator movies anyway. Can’t wait for America’s founding fathers being portrayed as black, oh wait…Did we lose a war or something?
“Modern Iran is to the US Empire what German tribes across the Rhine were for the Romans.”
You wish. They have better missiles and a larger ground army than the US. And nukes.
Brian Thompson, CEO of health care giant United Healthcare (#5 on Fortune 500) assassinated in Manhattan by a gunman who had been lying in wait for him. Disgruntled ex-employee?
I have heard it said that death is the great equalizer.
Yeah. Strangely, they cast the far-Celtic ginger Kevin McKidd to play the archetypal Roman, and the half-Hindoo Indira Varma as his wife. Perhaps the latter miscasting was overcompensation for the former miscasting, but I found them both a little jarring in what otherwise strove for a bit of realism.
I did appreciate that they wrote much of the dialog in a pseudo-Latin syntax. It sounds strange at first, but then you get used to hearing it and the different-but-comprehensible language is a reminder of the alien-but-understandable way that ancient Romans formed their concepts.
The Romans’ slaves were other white people.
I don’t think the former was his choice, he didn’t own the rights back then.
Macrinus was never Marcus Aurelius’ slave, nor was Heliogabalus transgender. Occasional transvestite would fit better his condition in Ancient Rome.
Sick patient fed up with wrong meds?
The US can, as I write, make a Peking duck out of China
Yep. The US being the biggest cultural force on the planet for a century or so means everything is magnified, including our history with slavery. Objectively it was quite minimal and pretty tame by historical standards as well as compared to contemporaries like Brazil and the Caribbean colonies whose appetite for Africans dwarfed what is now the US (because they worked them all to death), and by all rights should be a relatively minor footnote in history.
Instead it’s been elevated out of all proportion, including the sense of grievance and what is owed to the descendants of slaves. I saw Biden was in Angola yesterday, and the NYT had an article this weekend about how the country is trying to strengthen ties to the US by playing up slavery, which obviously glides right past the fact that it was Africans who were the enslavers of other Africans. That every slave who arrived in the US had their fate decided long before by co-ethnics is the part of history that is studiously avoided because nothing can be extracted from them, while it can be taken from modern whites through our perverted version of democracy.
The problem with hereditary kingship is that we humans do not reproduce by budding.
Elected kingship–George is the best leader and fighter our tribe has–could work pretty well for our tribal ancestors, but tends to break down.
In the end, there is no alternative to a republic. Productive, conscientious, responsible men coming together to make decisions that–ideally, if they are doing their job–preserve and enhance their nation for the long run, for their posterity.
(We are so far from that now it’s not even a joke but a sadistic mockery of “republic”, of “nation” of “civilization”.)
Either way, Neoclassical plantation houses often look beautiful.
Re: your comment above about Iran (“They” presumably).
What planet do you live on? Or are you a paid Chinese troll like some who post here?
The Iranian retaliatory missile barrages a month ago or so showed what they can do. Not much, with most of these medium range Russian missile clones being shot down. They wasted them on a show for the locals, their own population.
What “ground army” is that? The “Revolutionary Guards”? A mainly domestic thug militia to keep control. More like a theocratic SS “army” than a military one. Tiny Iraq killed millions of Iranians in their bloody war about 35 years ago or so, a terrible waste. Nukes? Says who? Even they don’t claim that.
You can post almost anything here (off topic, this) but fantasy about Iran is laughable.
Their “armies” consist of hired mostly Shiite mercenary militia outfits in Gaza and Lebanon. Locals who get paid to attack Israel when they can.
The miserable Iranian people have to put up with this crazy business managed by a geriatric Shia religious mafia running things.
Fortunately, not our problem.
Of course, as every schoolboy knows, Roman senators *exclusively* spoke with upper class RADA modulated ‘Oxford’ tones which were, until recent times, the regular speech pattern of the traditional English vested elite as typified by such great institutions as the Public (strictly private) Schools, the Anglican Church, Oxford and Cambridge, ‘Whitehall’, Army general staff, the Admiralty etc etc.
The observation that “Americans had thought endlessly about Ancient Rome until the later 20th century” as reflected in American movies, aligns misfortunately with Martin Scorsese’s career.
As a child, Scorsese famously aspired to create Roman epics, but he came of age as director just after the 1964 flop The Fall of the Roman Empire ended the possibility of further swords-and-sandals epics, so his oeuvre instead tended toward ancient Roman moral aesthetics atavistically playing out in the streets of New York.
Once Scorsese became influential enough to end Hollywood’s anti-Roman little dark age, Ridley Scott was already claiming the genre with Gladiator. Or maybe Scorsese was just content with his by then trademark subjects.
Disgruntled ex-customer?
Disgruntled ex-customer’s spouse?
How about a review of the movie reviewer’s movie review?
I’m not much into movies. So I was perfunctorily reading with glazed eyes names like Maximus, Commodus, etc.. Names that meant nothing to me before I read about them, and names that still mean nothing to me after I read about them. Then, bam, out of the blue, there is this:
This line is so good that it belongs in Steve’s next anthology. And the timing was perfect. Indeed, just when, out of boredom, I was questioning my policy of if Steve writes it I am going to read it, and just when I was wondering if Steve had lost his fastball, out of nowhere Steve fires the literary equivalent of Nolan Ryan 106 mph chin music.
Later, Steve peeks the interest of this mostly disinterested observer with the HBD related notion that Rome did better when its rulers were chosen for their talents (i.e. choosing the most talented adopted man in the household) rather than choosing their rulers by heredity (i.e. choosing the eldest son regardless of his capabilities, or lack there of). Steve even quotes Machiavelli who, way back in the 16th century, pointed out the superior results that Rome obtained choosing emperors by talent rather than by heredity. One wonders that if Steve had been around in the 16th century, he might have beaten Machiavelli to the punch of noticing the advantage of talent over heredity as far as choosing Roman Emperors was concerned. Of course, we will never know. But, my money would have been on Steve.
Bottom line, read Steve’s movie reviews even if you think that, in general, movies suck. Indeed, take the broad position that, regardless of whether or not the topic is of interest to you, if Steve writes it you should read it.
“Yeah. Strangely, they cast the far-Celtic ginger Kevin McKidd to play the archetypal Roman, and the half-Hindoo Indira Varma as his wife. Perhaps the latter miscasting was overcompensation for the former miscasting, but I found them both a little jarring in what otherwise strove for a bit of realism. ”
I don’t think it that strange really, at least no stranger than casting Russell Crowe as a Spanish Roman General, or any and all of the rest of the non Italian cast in Gladiator. The show was a British production and it cast mostly British actors. I think the McKidd and Stevenson (who passed away sadly) castings were well done, and the two had exceptional on screen chemistry. The McKidd/Vorenus character actually refers to his own Gaelic appearance in some dialog at one point during the series. Polly Walker is outstanding as Attia, as are the actors who play Caesar and Antony.
The biggest problem with the show is that it was damned to only two seasons, so the plot rushes way too fast through the period. This is especially evident in the 2nd and final season, which was clearly not as good as the 1st. The decline is punctuated by the absolutely horrific casting of the actor who played the older Octavian Caesar. Everything about him, he appearance, his manner of speaking, and how the character was written (effeminate, uncertain, and of course sexually dysfunctional) really dragged the show down. The actor who plays Agrippa (the same guy who played Freddie Mercury’s primary parasitic manipulating homosexual “friend” in Bohemian Rhapsody) is also a terrible casting. Boyish, doe eyed and timid is not how I would ever envision Agrippa, even as a younger man. At least McKidd and Stevenson looked like men.
I think you’ll be happy with the movie version of Hamilton.
“Bozo-moderate” is one way to think of Bob Barr; real OGs know his Dad hired Epstein at Dalton and he has been a deep state hatchet man for years; rumor has it he Oliver North’s right hand man for George HW Bush during Iran-Contra and ran the Mena, AK operation. Steve noted that Barr, despite all of that, astutely saved Trump’s bacon during the riots when he got loyal govt cops from the US Marshals and ATF to protect Trump doing the BLM riots of 2020.
Barr is a weasel and an operator but when the chips were down he at least knew who “buttered his bread”.
Caracalla’s mother was Syrian, meaning at the time, Greek-Aramean in culture, and probably also in blood;
The north african and southern european contribution are simple variations of the same “music”;
He was hardly, much darker than average.
Agree.
“Two weeks ago I argued that it wasn’t ridiculous to imagine that an exceptional black could rise to a position of power broker in the Roman Empire.”
Perhaps, except historically speaking, it did not occur. In history, it’s best to go with what actually DID happen, and not what “might have, coulda shoulda, like maybe, etc” happened.
Chis Caldwell in his book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Entitlement:_America_Since_the_Sixties
notes that before the Coup slavery was a minor part of the board sweep of the American story of founding a new nation and conquering a continent. But now American children are indoctrinated with slavery/blacks/race as the core narrative and racial good thought thinking as the most important American value. While Americaness being rooted in civic duty and our conquering, settling and building of America are nothing burgers.
The carefully cultivated–minoritarian ideology–sense of grievance is the noteworthy element. Blacks are constantly told they are owed something.
In fact, along with slave traders–European and African–American blacks are the biggest winners from slavery. Plain and simple. They get to live in a prosperous white–at least previously–run nation, with a standard of living at least an order of magnitude higher than any of their African ancestral homelands.
The biggest losers are the slaves who died in transit and to a lesser extent the slaves themselves and … American whites who have to pay and pay and pay and share the country their ancestors built with blacks and their issues and dysfunction.
All this embarrassing nonsense disguised as a history simply goes to show that Trump had no idea what he was doing then, has learned nothing, and has no idea what he’s doing now. He’s a middle-school chess club champion playing against Paul Morphy. Laughter, then tears, ensue.
The Chinese may think we are Persia–old and tired–and they are Rome.
Except instead of pointless warring, they’ll just wait for the Muslim conquest to take out the West, while–changing the narrative–carefully avoiding that themselves.
There is, or was, a theory that Romans went barren from eating too much lead. Did Caracalla eat silver?
Hollywood may have soured on Rome, but Broadway was still interested:
” … Pushkin’s great-grandfather … an extraordinarily clever sub-Saharan slave, became … the ancestor of much of Britain’s current aristocracy”.
Not exactly. The Pushkin descendant who married into the British aristocracy was his great-granddaughter Nadejda Mikhailovna de Torby, who was 1/64th African (assuming Abram Petrovich Gannibal was wholly African). She married the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven in 1916, and had two children (a daughter born in 1917 and a son born in 1919).
Nadejda’s daughter (Lady Tatiana Mountbatten) was 1/128th African and died childless.
Nadejda’s son David (3rd Marquess of Milford Haven) had two sons and five grandchildren, all of whom are living, and these seven people (and any children they might have) are the only living descendants of Pushkin in the British aristocracy. The grandchildren are each 1/512th African.
Perhaps the grandchildren should all move to California to get their fair share of the proposed reparations.
Your neocon narrative is totally wrong. Israeli and US air defense proved ineffective at stopping Iranian ballistic missiles, not to mention supersonic missiles. And they do have a large and well-trained army. This is not 1991 anymore.
To be fair, there was a plot line that addresses Lucius’ red-haired appearance. While running for a public office, Lucius must reassure the people in a speech that he is just as Roman as any of them, in spite of his obvious Gallo-Celtic appearance.
I seem to remember the show not flinching from its portrayal of Jews as well. There was something about a Jewish plot in the second season, with one of the Jewish characters quite overt in his contempt for all non-Jews.
It is doubful that anyone in Rome would have thought of themselves as being part of a “white group.” They would fallen into lines of ethnicity, religion, and clans.
Given the demographics trends of China, waiting is not in their interest.
To the extent that Iran today gets weapons and manufactured products from China, Iran could still be the equivalent to the ancient Persians. Chinese manufacturing, specifically in steel, gave the Parthians an advantage at the Battle of Carrhae:
Passion of the Christ was also such potential.
The character of Pilate was worth expanding on a little bit. He was a magistrate more or less alone among disgusting Jews.
He did a Jesus film.
Which is all about Romans observing Jews.
“Fortunately, not our problem.”
Yes, the crux of the matter.
Speaking of the first Gladiator film, the soundtrack had the song ‘Now we are free’, by Hans Zimmer.
Operatic tenor Innocent Masuku sings this very well, perhaps better than anyone else in the world :
Video Link
This proves that bringing Africans to Europe can generate high-quality cultural output. How can you be against someone named Innocent, who just wants to come to Europe and sing opera? He learned Italian and everything.
People should be very skeptical of claims by ancient Roman that this or that political figure was, in modern terms, gay or trans.
To ancient Romans, to be sexually penetrated was the most horrible thing imaginable for a man, and to willing choose to be penetrated, the most shameful.
Therefore, they regularly slandered political enemies with such allegations.
For example, have you heard that Caesar was gay and the passive lover of the king of Bithynia? If you have heard that, it doesn’t mean Caesar was gay. It means Caesar had enemies. Enemies who spread stories about Caesar being penetrated in order to slander him.
So when you hear that Heliogabalus or Nero were effeminate, passive gays, it just mean they had enemies.
It’s different with Hadrian. As far as I can tell he’s the only “gay emperor” who was not accused of being on the passive side of the relationship. He was also the first Roman emperor to go Greek (literally, this is not an euphemism). He spent more time in the Greek Eastern Mediterranean than in Italy. So it is not surprising that he also took himself a boy as lover, following the custom of romanticized pederasty of the Greek aristocracy.
The Romans did not have that kind of romanticized pederasty. If a Roman raped a slave boy it would not have been a relationship like in Greece. A Roman would not have taken a boy as public lover, much less deified him after his death.
Christian mobs busted statues and monuments all over the Roman WORLD when they took over.
Statues especially. Christians thought they were idols. You neutralize an idol by busting operational parts… noses, arms, eyes, whatever. It’s why lots of statues in museums are missing parts.
The Taliban does it now. My interpretation is: If a civilization wants to memorialize itself, build great forums, aqueducts, and arenas. Takes a lot to wreck them and most survive as useful ruins anyway.
And roads. Awful hard to bunch up hundreds of miles of roadway. The Via Appia remains Rome’s greatest monument and no enemy ever tried to break it up. Destroying it would take more effort than building it in the first place.
Eisenhower’s interstate highways will last when the Statue of Liberty is carted off for tuna cans.
One thing I liked about Paul Mescal’s performance was that he eschewed the ultra-shredded physique that has become the norm among action movie stars these days in favor of a throwback square-jawed, big-shouldered 1950s beefcake look. He’d be right at home in an old Technicolor sword and sandal epic playing Samson or Hercules — or playing a 1940s period-accurate version of Batman or Superman in a black-and-white serial.
Indeed. We typically have one to three sources on all but the most famous Roman emperors, so it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s just political slander.
That’s true, but the question is not what ancient Romans thought. The question is about today’s mobs. Today’s mobs don’t care about European slaves or ancient Roman thought. They are not descended from the former nor capable of the latter.
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Whose crimes Major General Stanley can quote in elegiacs.
Seriously, how many people’s only knowledge of that guy is his mention in the Major General Song?
By the 3rd Century (as in “Crisis of the—”) there were fewer than a dozen known historians, and of those only the works of about two and half survive in any significant quantity: Cassius Dio and Herodian, plus a bit of Dexippus and Julius Africanus (who wrote mainly on church matters). Despite the main subject being the Roman Empire, most of these guys were already writing in Greek.
For comparison, there were more than twice as many known historians of the 1st Century, and more of their work survives, despite it being longer ago. And more of it is in Latin.
For another comparison, there were also about a dozen known Chinese historians in the 3rd Century and a similar portion of their work is now lost (i.e., most of it). But whereas the 3rd Century was a nadir for Western historians, it was a local maximum for Chinese historians.
Well done.
The 2nd season sub plot about Timon and his family was ham fisted and gratuitous. Without getting into a long diatribe, what I took away from it was that it was Rome, Romans, and Roman culture that was ultimately the culprit for the Jews losing their humble and meager ways, and indulging in the hedonism, excesses, and violence ubiquitous in Rome (as portrayed in the show). Jews as victims, as usual.
“ . . . or at least give lip service to the notion, that ancient Rome was the original enemy of Christianity.”
No, you are mistaken. The “original enemy” of Christianity were the Jews. They were the ones who aggressively opposed the new faith and were responsible for the execution/stoning of first Christian martyr, Stephen (Acts 7). The Jews attempted to influence the Romans to hate Christians and sought their assistance to stamp out what they considered to be a new religion. The Romans were initially indifferent to the Christian faith. In fact, a Roman Centurion submitted himself to Jesus to request a favor (Matthew 8:8). Roman persecution began decades after Christianity got going, but the original enemy were the Jews.
Really looking forward to Steve’s review of the new Snow White movie, and tell us how pretty and charming the ghastly and awful lead actress is, and how totally plausible it would have been for negro huntsman to be wandering the forests of Germany in the 17/1800’s.
“ . . . African–American blacks are the biggest winners from slavery.”
An interesting and contentious point indeed! A quite famous African-American, Muhammad Ali, totally agreed with your sentiment when he said “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat! (Lol!)”
However, I can think that for the years that African-Americans had second-class status in this country, that there would not have been many who thought of being in America as winning.
Remember “John Q”?
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Review by Steve Sailer.
https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2002/02/14/Film-of-the-Week-Denzels-John-Q/37561013706416/
Trajan was also hungry for boys. For example when Cassius Dio said he loved wine and boys:
“I know, of course, that he was devoted to boys and to wine, but if he had ever committed or endured any base or wicked deed as the result of this, he would have incurred censure; as it was, however, he drank all the wine he wanted, yet remained sober, and in his relation with boys he harmed no one.”
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/cassius_dio/68*.html
Or when Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor, made fun of Trajan’s sexual escapades, saying that on Olympus, he could steal Jupiter’s Ganymedes :
“Accordingly Trajanus entered forthwith, carrying on his shoulders the trophies of his wars with the Getae and the Parthians. Silenus, when he saw him, said in a whisper which he meant to be heard, “Now is the time for Zeus our master to look out, if he wants to keep Ganymedes for himself.”
https://www.attalus.org/translate/caesars.html
None of the quotes question Trajan’s masculinity. The Romans considered him their best emperor. By no means they imagined him as a passive faggot.
The Romans were pragmatic about sex. They weren’t very interested in romantic love. This comment by Horace indicates this well:
“Do you ask for a golden cup when you’re dying
Of thirst? Do you scorn all but peacock, or turbot
When you’re starving? When your prick swells, then,
And a young slave girl or boy’s nearby you could take
At that instant, would you rather burst with desire?
Not I: I love the sexual pleasure that’s easy to get.”
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/intranets/students/modules/body/organisation/vulbod_handout_7.doc
Among his many delusions, Trump suffers from the ludicrous impression that being a top CEO is pretty much the same thing as being a top politician, that politics is just like business at the top. You’re the guy who gives the orders, they report to you, whadda whadda, same thing same old. Hah. These days he spends a lot of time hanging around and taking advice from Elon Musk, another very successful rich guy who is a professional businessman, NOT a professional politician. (“Businessman,” a la mode de Biden Crime Family, is of course a side gig profession in most politics, but it’s a spin-off affair.) I bet Trump never even figured out why Jared Kushner always seemed to be in the room with him whenever decisions were discussed or made.
Politics as a metier, as a career avocation, is generally begun at entry-level when a person is still in college, or even in high school, before a person’s mind has really developed, before they have acquired any actual life experience or wisdom, or even done much of any reading outside of a closed and cliched and rather intellectually tepid political syllabus. In terms of any sort of personal or spiritual or conceptual depth, even a very good politician is more like a guy you meet at Starbucks who hands you a book called “Ten Steps to Becoming a Self-Employed Millionaire” and says, “You HAVE to read this book! It changed my LIFE!” People who, in Current Year, still glowingly quote Martin Luther King, and mean it.
Nearly all professional politicians have the same ideals, principles, and outlook on life that they had when they were 19 years old. Of the few of them who actually realize this, they think that that’s a good thing.
And even those smug twats have an advantage over Trump, who despite meaning well, effectively has no ideals, principles, or outlook on life whatsoever, none of what Frank Zappa in another context called “your conceptual continuity”.
Trump is a brilliant campaigner, nothing more. He should have used his considerable talents in that sphere, campaigning for somebody else. And no, not Vance, someone who could actually do stuff.
The crux of the biscuit, is the apostrophe.
? There seems to be a leap there. Being a Russian general does not obviously lead to you being the progenitor of Hanoverian aristocracy.
Make copies of each statue.
which is what Rome did.
If you’ve ever been to the collusion, there’s dozens of busts in there of the emperors and senators.
Blacks in South Africa were second class citizens as well. And they were the most fortunate Blacks in all of Africa.
A thank you from them would be nice.
The late, lamented “colloidal silver man”. Otherwise known as ‘Papa Smurf’.
His blue coloration was, apparently, indelible and literally stained right into his epidermis due the chap’s penchant for drinking ‘colloidal silver’, the snake-oil of choice for a certain type of American who are vested in fringe movements.
There is a Roman link of sorts. The Romans named the ancient inhabits of Scotland, or Caledonia as they styled it, Picti – literally ‘painted men’, due to their predilaction of dyeing their skin (comes off with wash) blue using woad extract. Hence ‘Picts’.
The Scots came later via Ireland.
Good points. Octavian was probably more like Tony Soprano in real life. Strike that, more like Johnny Sacks. In any case the elites in Rome in that era were fairly mean bastards most of them, the idea that they were effeminate fops is probably mostly from British writers projecting their own society backwards.
In the case of the HBO series I suspect the writers were trying to create a contrast between the elites and the hardened legionaries who were the heart of the show. Also for dramatic reasons they needed Octavian to be a very different personality than Caesar and Antony, and may have overdone it.
They’ll have to get in line behind Prince Archie and Princess Lillibet.
Aw, if only the cattle had voted for the DEI Stock Photo. But no. Fools, you only had to listen!
“If you’ve ever been to the collusion”
Isn’t that a building in Washington though?
Protestants did the same in Europe to Catholic church decoration. Even in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeldenstorm
“People who, in Current Year, still glowingly quote Martin Luther King, and mean it.”
I like the meme of a depressed-looking MLK with the caption
“When you realise they were judging you by your character all along”.
Boring stagnant review completely in keeping with the premise.
An insert of a marble statue, a titular font that grabs your attention, diversions into sub topics that don’t advance the central premise.
Steve Sailer was once lauded as a breakout star, a man who once stood against the tide demanding it halt!
Today he’s just another internet name competing for patreons, rattling his tin, no better than than any begger on any street corner.
I can tell you this for sure and certain: I’d never stoop to Sailer’s level of racial desertion.
“Edward Gibbon considered the Five Good Emperors who practiced succession by adoption: from Nerva’s ascension in A.D. 96 through the aggressive Trajan” yada yada
You know that he’s researched the subject on Wikipedia by the numerous mistakes.
First of all, even citing Gibbon.
“Succession by adoption was not a formal theory but an expedient, rather like how CEOs of modern corporations foster their successors ”
Is this true?
Consider: Sailer is now a court appointed propagandist, appointed to turn you and yours to the will of his employer
“In Gladiator, like in the 1964 flop The Fall of the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius is murdered so the succession of his incompetent son Commodus can’t be held against him.”
Too confusing, overly complicated , clearly a confused subtext to explain why Steve has become a typical mainstream “intellect” excusing outrages against White people on account of some sort of supra-national emergency that must take precedence against our own genocide.
I rate his review 2/10
Video Link
Well, we invoke HBD around here because everywhere else pointedly avoids it.
But, as a first approximation, half the equation is nature; the other half nurture.
The nurturing provided by Arab, Kurd, Black, etc. is a little lacking for superpower logistics.
Two weeks ago I argued that it wasn’t ridiculous to imagine that an exceptional wigger could rise to a position of power broker in the Judeo American Empire. For instance, as successor to a long line of half-breeds with secret service antecedents that remain classified it’s not so unfathomable that out of the latter 21st century morass a TV personality with nothing else but MTV WWE charisma would rise to the level of our decline and become president for a day.
Sailer appears to be a Jew.
Health insurance is pretty vital stuff, even – perhaps especially in places with socialised medicine – on holiday*.
So our man is (perhaps) a martyr.
*Young people think they’re immortal and think places like Thailand and Laos are one big party scene.
The facts of the Russiagate witch hunt are history, not nonsense. Do you think it was a good idea for Sessions to recuse himself, and do you think Trump was unreasonable for being angry about it? I think it was a bad idea, and I think Trump was not unreasonable–but I also wish he hadn’t fired Sessions. It’s possible to understand a decision without agreeing with it, and without simply dismissing the person who makes it as a blithering idiot.
The book:
Only with nukes. And America would disappear too. So what’s the point?
Also, let’s not dismiss outright the unusual and surprising final-ever earthly tweet by CEO Brian Thompson:
(Unconfirmed rumor, source: investigative journalist Mr. Sam Hyde, Esq.)
If you are claiming that some culture or set of institutions will allow for a multiracial society built on HBD policies, there is no evidence for that.
Unless, the old South Africa is what you mean by a multiracial society.
Not clear that they had a better outcome outside of America.
One can be upset with their status on the lifeboat and still be thankful for the lifeboat.
“Only with nukes. And America would disappear too.”
Hmm, tell me more about your intriguing “make America disappear” idea. Do you have a website, or a newsletter perchance?
We need to live in a country where people like Dafna Yoran are not in positions of power and authority over us. If your enemies have power over you it is not your country. She is not a peer, and not a fellow citizen. She is a hostile alien.
You’re how old, again?
Looks like the motive may be clear
https://www.newsweek.com/brian-thompson-updates-delay-deny-defend-casings-unitedhealthcare-ceos-death-scene-1996029
Ahh, shadows of the earlier years of this comment section, when one could glean useful and interesting information. Thank you.
(((Every Single Time.)))
his nation of birth is unknown. Does this look “sub-Saharan” to you?
do you have proof of the above?
Weird after the last few years have demonstrated a handful of military realities to get these bizzaro takes.
I’m not military affairs guy, but a bunch of stuff is pretty clear to even an “intelligent layman” from America’s wars, Putin’s War, the latest Middle East drama(s).
— The Russian military is huge, but not very good. Weapons, training, quality of NCOs, ability/initiative of junior officers. Far, far below the US standard. It is now pounding down the Ukrainians with sheer mass. But really unimpressive display.
— It’s the age of the missile, the drone. Convention aircraft, armor, ships relatively more exposed.
— Western weapons are still far superior. But–again “age of the missile”–other folk’s stuff can still be quite lethal. Still Western weapons systems better on offense and much better defending against “the age of the missile”. (See Israel’s missile interceptions–not great, but not bad.)
— The US military is still the top of the class. Quality of weapons, NCOs, junior officers and especially training. Not clear, but it may be the only military in the world that really gets sufficient continuous training to effectively use modern combined arms. (We know the Russians don’t. Iran–doubtful. China?) “Diversity!” and “wokeness”–and simple demographics–are now eroding what was recently a white run, highly capable Western army. But right now seemingly still top of the class.
— While the US military can “break stuff” and destroy other armies … what it can not do is repeal HBD. It cannot make Arabs or central Asian tribes into Westerners–in attitudes nor capabilities. No surprise there. The anti-empirical biological fallacy pushed forward by the minoritarian goon squad has been well demonstrated to be a fallacy back in the good old USofA. Foreign verification not required.
BTW, if both your missiles and nukes points were true, Iran could just tell Israel “stop it”. Israelis have an obvious interest in trying to hunt down all the Hamas goons who launched the Oct 7 terror raid. (Akin to the US trying to hunt down Osama.) But it’s hardly essential, much less existential. It’s several orders of magnitude less important than some nutters nuking Tel Aviv.
OT — Tim Shorrock on Korea. Tldr, American foreign policy for the Korean peninsula benefits from the same brilliant strategy as is seen when we depend on lying retards who know nothing about Russia for our Russia policy. Shorrock in 1996 uncovered documents demonstrating American knowledge of and direct material support for the Gwangju massacre, where South Korean pro-democracy demostrators were killed by the military government in 1980, following the assassination of the long-serving (and successgully industrializing) dictator Park Chung Hee.
https://archive.is/vOPe1
He must not mean “ancestor” in the normal or genetic sense, but in the looser sense of predecessor.
I guess I missed your point.
I thought you were suggesting the earliest Neolithic people (Middle Easteners) could have continued on some kind of HBD path and been the world superpowers today.
The quality of the PLA strikes me as a great unknown.
The don’t quite have Western quality weapons, but have quite good stuff of their own. Their military is huge, with a huge budget. The question is how well are they trained. In an actual fight, would they know how to make everything work together?
We don’t know. The fact is other than killing Indian soldiers on the border now and again just to be dicks , the Chinese haven’t done any fighting in generations. They pushed around the Vietnamese long back and before that humiliated India. But really their last major conflict with was the US/UN forces in Korea–the great granddads of the boys in the PLA today.
Fortuitously, we don’t need to find out. The US and China both have sufficient nukes so that a serious direct shooting war is–thankfully–off the table.
The real competition will be demographic/eugenic. In that contest both nations have issues, but sadly America under the rule of minoritarian and immigrationist zealots is in much worse shape, while the Chinese have a lot of headroom and time to work out a soft-land with eugenic fertility.
He was definitely Pushkin’s ancestor but the House of Hanover? Nah…
Curious to note, but the last big Roman epic movie prior to Ridley Scott’s first iteration of Gladiator was Bob Guccione’s Caligula – scripted by Gore Vidal, no less.
Many might say that Caligula exemplified the decadent state of Hollywood and the movie business in general circa 1980 – the industry was on it’s last knockings, in what seemed like a long slow, protracted terminal decline – by this time color TV penetration was all but universal in American households, and cinema appeared to be a vestige of a past age, an anachronism having more in common with Charlie Chaplin than the Sony Trinitron. Hollywood responded with all manner of garish outlandish gimmicks to stay afloat – this lead to wild claims, made by some pretty heavyweight film and cultural critics, that hardcore pornography, (now *that was the real cinematic growth industry of the 1970s deca(ye)d ), and Hollywood would merge and become one, so to speak. Yes. Really. That was not a fringe view. Anyhow, the mind boggles at the prospect of Meryl Streep doing unspeakable things on the silver screen, but as a matter of fact, we got close to that back in good ol’ ’79, with delightful Helen Mirren in the aforementioned Caligula. And not to mention Sir John Gielgud, the stately foremost Hamlet of his era. And Malcolm McDowell. Directed by the celebrated Italian Tinto Brass, of whom the sobriquet “Cheeks Obsessed” is of course, obligatory, Caligula was widely panned and hated by the critics. But it got the last laugh, becoming an underground classic which in pre internet days commanded a small fortune for illicit purchase in the video cassette.
Well, she does have hair as black as ebony, and lips as red as blood.
Two out of three ain’t bad.
China’s only plus is national homogeneity, true. But the US is so ahead of them re planes, satellites, drones, artillery, navy (despite the fact that a big chunk of US ships production must go to Japan’s, S Korea’s & other shipyards), missiles,… that the comparison is simply not reasonable.
The US Army would wipe them out in a conventional warfare.
I remember visiting a second-hand bookshop in Germany. One interesting book was about death masks of famous people , with illustrations. The book was definitely pre-WW2 but I can’t recall if it came out under the Third Reich or under Weimar. It did draw attention to Pushkin’s African features, as well as the “Semitic” features of Heinrich Heine.
Fit For for Purpose…
The Russian military looks fit for purpose. It has carved off approx the square miles of Benelux-Denmark out of Ukraine in the last decade.
Jury selection on this will
Be difficult. Who has not been hurt by insurance companies?
“The Russian military is huge, but not very good. Weapons, training, quality of NCOs, ability/initiative of junior officers. Far, far below the US standard. It is now pounding down the Ukrainians with sheer mass. But really unimpressive display.”
You mean the same US military who couldn’t defeat North Korea, North Vietnam and the Taliban? The last time the US military was tested against a peer adversary was in WWII.
“It’s the age of the missile, the drone. Convention aircraft, armor, ships relatively more exposed.”
Indeed! And America is lagging behind Russia, China and even Iran in drone and missile innovation and volume of production. Anyway, America is a naval power, which means its power is effectively nullified by modern weapons.
“Not clear, but it may be the only military in the world that really gets sufficient continuous training to effectively use modern combined arms. ”
Combined arms manoeuvres are no longer possible with satellite and drone observation. Also, the best military training is actually fighting wars. No American soldier, officer or NCO have three years of experience under their belt fighting a peer adversary, like Russians do.
Deceiving ourselves is dangerous.
You boneheads know nothing about ancient Rome.
Rome was totally multi-cultural, in the sense that its citizens and denizens were from all over the world. Sorry that you don’t like the word, multi-cultural. But it’s true.
Slaves from all over the world over the generations became Romans. There were many, many, many Gauls, and Germans, most first appearing as slaves, as a result of the wars, thus, many redheads. There were plenty of Africans, sub-Saharan included, huge groups from the Levant, an Indian community, and even a Chinese community. The Roman aristocracy dressed in silk. The Romans did not know how to make silk. There is this thing called the Silk Road.
And ancient Roman would not have noticed a Roman citizen’s race. He would have noticed his aristocratic and/0r plebeian and/or freedman/slave ancestry. Class is everything, race nothing in ancient Rome.
For starters.
“the highlight of this year’s World Series was Los Angeles Dodger Freddie Freeman’s last-chance grand slam to beat the New York Yankees in the 10th inning of the first game. Rather than then flinging his bat away contemptuously in the modern style, Freeman instead strode toward first holding his bat skyward in a dignified gesture I instantly recognized, although I haven’t seen the movie in decades, as drawn from the body language of Gladiator.”
To be more relevant in today’s times, next time he does a game winner HR, he should salute a legit Gladiator–by doing the Trump dance.
Wondering if Trump’s dance moves are a senior citizen modified version of the Twist? After all, that would be among the first dances that the young teenage Trump would’ve been familiar with when out socializing.
If you watch videos of how Ridley Scott makes his films you’ll see his step one is to first come up with concept art of scenes he wants to film, then step two is to tell a screenwriter to write a story that somehow connects all those scenes together. Makes for some great movie trailers, but doesn’t always make for the best stories.
She is so ugly, that it’s a kind of superpower. You’d do anything as a judge to shut her up and limit the amount of time you and the jury had to gaze at that face.
Number 1: if masks were illegal, Brian Thompson’s assassin would be known. The assassin probably wouldn’t have performed the hit to begin with.
Number 2: Thompson was about to testify in a huge case. This may have been a professional hit, and the bullets a red herring to get investigators looking at activist groups or the family of someone denied coverage that ended a life. Who exactly was Thompson going to testify about? They all need to be looked at. Someone knew where he was gonna be at 6:30 in the morning that day.
Imagine j oil Ming up to fight wars to protect Israel only to have a prosecutor from them try you for trying to clean up the subway system.
Coliseum
Wikipedia: Gannibal’s oldest son, Ivan, became an accomplished naval officer who helped found the [now famous] city of Kherson in southern Ukraine in 1779.
One of his descendants is the dowager Duchess of Westminster, so there must have been more English marriages than the Milford Havens.
One movie critic, writing about Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” wrote that “Lonergan did not bite-off more than he can chew, but he might have bitten-off more than his viewers can chew.” That comes to mind now regarding Gladiator II’s writers and director. For this viewer at least, I am unable to, and I don’t want to try to, chew on this. The movie has crossed-over my movie-chewing threshold.
We just gave the best military triaining we could give anyone, specific to our systems, to China’s ally, and the only responsible assumption is that this was shared.
Did it have a red cover?
Yeah, that’s definitely my impression of Gladiator II. Here’s the outline of the screenplay:
Awesome Scene #1
Blah blah blah
Awesome Scene #2
Something something
Awesome Scene #3 etc
“Number 1: if masks were illegal, Brian Thompson’s assassin would be known. ”
What? If masks were illegal? Murder is illegal. So we are to assume by your logic that he would obey the lesser “masks are illegal” law but still choose to break the much greater “murder is illegal” law?
So he’s thinking, a murder rap is bad, but I don’t want to make it any worse by wearing a mask because that would really make it… more bad?
Sorry dude, but I don’t think a law against masks would have changed the murderer’s plan or the outcome.
I think you may be referring to old data. Just recently, I have seen:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8d886l028o
https://wccftech.com/intel-foundry-fails-to-impress-once-again-18a-process-yield-rates-poor/
Steve, you are in good company. Howard Hawks once said that a good movie was “three good scenes and no bad ones.”
Polygamy is dysgenic because over time it greatly increases paternal age and thus mutational load.
Harems were not common enough to really change the population, and the daughters of concubines were downwardly mobile and the sons often murdered their brothers and half brothers.
You are confused about the difference between “multicultural” and “cosmopolitan”. Cosmopolitan is when there’s a curious-looking guy from Sumatra living down by the docks, and nobody bats an eye. Multicultural is when the guy from Sumatra is your boss, and he lives in a better neighborhood than you, not in Sumatra-town. Rome the city was cosmopolitan, not multicultural. Rome the empire was pan-Mediterranean multicultural plus outliers (Black Sea outposts, Britain et cetera). Plus you’re a little shaky about how the Silk Road really worked.
Maybe you could be smug and condescending about something closer to home, like different brands of medicinal Arctic codliver oil.
That seems to be a common fake quote. It was attributed to Kobe Bryant in 2020:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jan/27/viral-image/no-kobe-bryant-didnt-tweet-about-having-dirt-hilla/
And to Ruth Bader Ginsburg later that year:
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-ruth-bader-ginsburg-did-not-tweet-that-she-had-information-that-coul-idUSKCN26C1VS/
OT- another proof that Trumpers are, when it comes to foreign policy, not to be regarded as normal moral rational human beings- and that includes some Dems
The guy was not a sub-Saharan African, and enough with this rubbish. Pushkin himself wrote a piece “Arab of the Peter the Great”, not “Black of Peter the Great”. Interestingly, English translation changed “Arab” to “Negro”.
“You boneheads know nothing about ancient Rome.”
Oh please do enlighten us oh noble one.
“Rome was totally multi-cultural, in the sense that its citizens and denizens were from all over the world. ”
This would have included the New World and Polynesia, as that is part of “the world”. So do tell us about the thriving, vibrant Aztec, Incan, and Samoan communities in Rome. Do tell.
Do tell about how Samoan famed gladiator Titus Polamalu and Flavius Seau defeated Apozanolotl and Atlacoya in the Arena.
“Sorry that you don’t like the word, multi-cultural. But it’s true.”
Uh, no, it’s too much smoking. Do please put down the bong and the blunts before posting…it’s not becoming.
“Slaves from all over the world”
Which includes Polynesia, Tenochtitlan, and Upolu.
Perhaps a more accurate sentence would’ve been slaves from all over the KNOWN world, as in, the parts of the world that were direclty KNOWN to the Romans at the time (ca. 2000 yrs ago).
“There were plenty of Africans, sub-Saharan included,”
Total BS. There’s such a thing called the Sahara, meaning one would have had to traverse its 3,000 miles in length to reach Sub-Saharan lands where Shaniqua and Shawntavius resided. Assuming of course, that the Romans were fully cognizant that they even existed (and they weren’t, for the most part–certainly not directly, it would’ve been by 2nd and 3rd hand accounts from Ethiopians and the like).
“huge groups from the Levant,”
The Middle East, uh yes, Western Asia was on Rome’s Empire’s backdoor (it was a part of it) so yes, they were well familiar with Jerusalem.
Like Duh.
“an Indian community, and even a Chinese community. ”
Maybe in Hippie Dave’s history book–not in actual, official, what’s the word,….legitimate historical accounts. Rome traded with India; it doesn’t follow that there were Indian communities in Rome.
After all, all one has to do is state: So. What happened to Raj and Hop Sing in ca.200AD? Where’d they all go? No accounts of such communities exist in the official chronicles of Rome. And, it would also explain, uh, WHY when Marco Polo (Venetian) traversed to China, in 13th century, his accounts of what he saw in China were widely dismissed for a couple centuries. Funny, how the Venetians, upon reading Marco’s findings and tales of China didn’t state “Ya know, it makes sense, because we have these ancient Chinese communities living in Rome that we can write to and ask what they think about these tales of China.”
Now assuming that this was all BS written, or basically sarcasm, then it was a very good joke. Otherwise, it’s a wonder how a person progressed past the sixth grade.
I hope, Mr. Ross, that you are wary of giving credence to someone like Tim Shorrock, who is a long-standing hard-Left ideologue who holds pro-North Korean views?
“how Ridley Scott makes his films you’ll see his step one is to first come up with concept art of scenes he wants to film, then step two is to tell a screenwriter to write a story that somehow connects all those scenes together.”
Ridley Scott went to Cal Arts? It’s all starting to make sense now…
Pretty much the same for music albums.
Keith Richards said it himself, that a good album had maybe one hit song, two other good ones, and the rest was what he called “filler.”
Caligula is a lousy B movie about ancient Rome with a few porno scenes of orgies inserted to up the titillation value. 0 stars out of five.
Helen Mirren in her younger days was well known for dropping her drawers for money at the slightest opportunity. In middle age she became a very fine actress.
Later, Mirren likened the experience of working on the movie to visiting a nudist camp.
“It is interesting that the Gladiator movies would be so succesful in our supposedly Christian nation.”
With “Christian nation” being the operative phrase.
That is probably why the founding fathers introduced unlimited pardoning, otherwise it would have been hard to find volunteers to run for office.
Black or grey, as far as I remember.
I know you’re being facetious here but the general idea is that America would be wiped off from the face of the earth too with nukes.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, she enjoys naturism.
While I don’t think a universal anti-mask law is at all practical, Gallatin’s idea is that masks are obvious and he could be stopped by any cop even one who didn’t know his intent. Sort of the way ‘stop and frisk’ prevents many murders. I. e. he’s not counting on voluntary compliance.
Huh? Most emperors never made it to the post-emperor phase of life. They either died in office or were murdered. I don’t know of many emperors who retired. I think Diocletian did. Not many others.
It’s part of the Oorah network, which runs a bunch of religious outreach programs for Jewish kids, run by the Mintz family. They have little or nothing to do with Israel, though they may run some outreach programs there.
Helen Mirren was truly spectacular in Savage Messiah, though we all fell in love with Dorothy Tutin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Messiah_(1972_film)
I think it was Wodehouse, or was it Chandler, who said of a woman “she had a figure that could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window“?
Even if, for the sake of argument, you are correct, is that enough to stop a man intent on murdering another man? I don’t think so. The perp would simply modify his approach to achieve his goal.
Well, I’m trying to say there is no evidence a successful society can ignore race (sorry for any confusion). HBD seemed to promise that it could promote people based only on traits like intelligence while ignoring race. But this has never happened anywhere. Mixed race societies are a mess.
https://movies2watch.tv/watch-movie/watch-may-18-hd-64169.5486494
Mr. Stix: All my attempts to get your link to open produce a page that is blank except for the words “No input file specified.” Has your article been taken down? Or have you been targeted by a hacker?
How would you–or anyone else–know?
The guy was taken by Ottomans–or bought by them–when he was a little kid and then grew up in Russia. I doubt Gannibal knew where he was from.
To figure it out, someone needs to dig him up and do the DNA testing.
The whole episode is yet another baroque clown show from parasitic nobility.
A Dominican and a Mexican?
It is not about exactness. Pushkin himself thought of him as some kind of Moor or darker Arab; even the Soviet movie I watched portrayed him as a dark Caucasian. It is true that Pushkin did have some Negroid features, but so do some “echt” Europeans. Pushkin’s daughter was, visually, a knockout & a template for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (not the story, just looks). Tolstoy never mentioned anything about blackness or anything similar.
God yeah! — and Egypt.
Ever been to the MET in NYC? It’s incredible. I went after hours with a Canadian Egypt historian and he showed me the drawers they have off the side of the exhibits. Incredible. They made busts of kings, queens, generals, whatever. When they needed a portrait they got out the bust, made the portrait, and shoved it back for next time. Immensely practical people, them Copts. Greeks borrowed ideas from them. They had mass production for art when a regime change made it necessary. I was impressed.
You should be arrested for wearing a mask in public unless it’s Halloween or Mardi Gras, period.
The allowance of masks are why we have antifa. If they could be recognized from camera footage all that would end immediately. Masks confer anonymity to a lawbreaker. That needs to change in 2025 ASAP. Much is going to change on January 21.
Great post regarding U.S. military weaknesses. I am reminded of how, a few years ago. a U.S. destroyer collided with a slow-moving merchant ship. And then, in a short order, the very same thing happened to another U.S. destroyer. One wag, on a blog, posted this analogy: Imagine that, on the expanse of The Bonneville Salt flats, a Chevy Corvette is trying to avoid getting bonked by…wait for it…a bulldozer. A team of experts specifically trained in bulldozer-avoidance is trying to help the Chevy Vet, but fails.
“The allowance of masks are why we have antifa. If they could be recognized from camera footage all that would end immediately.”
Pfft. No it wouldn’t.
Have, a…. nother Nutter Butter Peanut Butter Sandwich Cooookie!
Indeed they do.
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/210221115959-anthony-fauci-mask-210121.jpg?q=w_2000,h_1125,x_0,y_0,c_fill
https://www.unz.com/isteve/into-the-wild-blue-pink-and-white-yonder/#comment-4670830
To be fair, the ‘vette and the bulldozer both frequent the same ports and shipping lanes. But still, much larger navies with much less technology have somehow avoided this for hundreds of years. DEI just keeps innovating…
Chandler.
Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse both went to Dulwich College prep school in London. Their families didn’t have enough money to send them to Oxford/Cambridge.
Both ended up living in the USA, although Chandler, who was born in Chicago, is considered an American author and Wodehouse, who was born in England, an English author, in part because of where they situated their great characters. But their famous styles are combination of English and American. Bertie Wodehouse’s style is heavily influenced by 1914 Broadway slang, while Philip Marlowe’s style is more superb than Sam Spade’s.
Right. Diocletian was the only Roman Emperor who retired.
Of course, Keith Richards’ standards for good ones and filler were pretty high.
This is like the 31st best Keith Richards’ song:
I am experiencing the same problem. I tried it in several browsers, makes no difference.
That’s all fine and good but a mask law would not have prevented Brian Thompson’s murder.
https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/dewine-haitian-immigrants-welcome-needed-in-ohio-pastor-says-some-are-leaving/EJRM4325GFEGVGNY5H5UU43KR4/
Plenty of “cosmopolitan” “bosses” in ancient Rome. And rich cosmopolitans. Who were the bosses of the people they owned or employed. There was a road from China to the Mediterranean. Many different ethnic groups traveled along it. For a thousand years. Romans didn’t care about race. Class is what they cared about.
My god, are you ignorant. And fatuous, which usually goes together with ignorant.
Your ignorance of the subject does not warrant your arrogance.
After some rummaging, I managed to find another path to the desired destination.
It is claimed Alexander Dumas had Negro ancestry but I cannot see the trace of it in the photos of him, and modern examples of miscegenation show that the dark eclipses the white. Nature does not make race-mixing easy.
The idea that an exceptional black would somehow rise to prominence due to merit in Russia or anywhere else that was homogeneous seems awfully unlikely since the society would have a lot of natives of merit to choose from.
Othello is a warning that races don’t mix.
The alien cannot find true acceptance in an adopted society.
As for Gladiator, the 2000 movie did its best to promote an anti-white agenda for its day.
Maximus seems to be Spanish, his wife and child are very dark, and he ultimately needs to die to find happiness–which is about as unnatural a life lesson as it gets.
And then there is history:
I see your 2009 Mix and raise you this live version from 1971 where Mick Taylor is tearing it up on guitar. The RS were never as good after he left.
Thanks! Love that album. Love Keith.
Used to know a contractor who built a fence for Keith at his home in nearby Weston, Connecticut. He told me two things: 1) Keith had a weathervane on top of his house that was a guitar, swinging in the wind. 2) He loved his Absolut vodka.
DeWine is a useless cuck. With “conservatives” like him, who needs liberals?
BTW, if there was a joke or a dig in your song selection I didn’t get it. If there was, well, I am flattered here in my silk upholstered chair.
Here’s a better link:
https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2024/12/did-america-avoid-big-steal-ii-or-get.html
Dear Mon. de Craon and deep anonymous,
I apologize for your inconvenience, and thank you for bringing this to my attention. I just had the same experience, and not for the first time. (The trouble always occurs at that Website in the middle of the night. Perhaps the publisher shuts it down sometimes for maintenance.)
Fortunately, I had also since revised and re-posted the article in question to my primary blog.
“Did America Avoid Big Steal II, or Get It in a Way She Never Expected? (Revised)”
https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2024/12/did-america-avoid-big-steal-ii-or-get.html
Thanks. Because the moderator doesn’t release all comments in the order they were posted, I found this link through another poster later in this thread. In fact, I should have thought of it myself in the first place because I am aware of Nicholas Stix Uncensored.
As for its substance, I cannot dismiss this theory out of hand. Trump sure does fail to deliver to his “deplorable” supporters. I can’t dismiss the idea that he does so on purpose, as Stix seems to conclude.
Enlighten us, O non-arrogant anon.
Dear Mon. de Craon
It’s just M.
Funny, Never thought of inner city Hasidic Jews as underprivileged.
There’s evidence he was going to testify on Hillary Clinton
The third Emperor, Tiberius, who was always an apparently reluctant Emperor, semi-retired to his villa on Capri at age 66 or so, outsourcing administration of Rome to Sejanus. That ultimately didn’t work out too well, either for Sejanus or Tiberius, which may have soured subsequent Emperors and Emperor-aspirants on the concept of retirement.
Tiberius is best understood as less reluctant (though I do think he’d have preferred a legionary camp) than as someone who viewed the still developing imperial role in a very specific way. He was a throwback arch-conservative who would have been temperamentally happier in the Rome of Cincinnatus or Fabius Maximus rather than Augustus. He really did expect the Senate to share power with him and only began to groom his son when it became clear they weren’t.
I think the death of his son-the product of his first marriage, which unusually for Roman aristocrats of this era, does seem to have been a genuinely loving, faithful one-really broke him. And when it was revealed Sejanus killed him… for Christians, this has an interesting wrinkle: Sejanus was a notorious anti-Semite. His downfall and the subsequent policy reversals meant that Pilate would have been a very politically vulnerable spot. It’s unlikely the Sanhedrin did not know this.
The primary job of the US military is to dissuade external enemies of the United States if possible and kill them if not. It is not a job works program, it is not a government builder for foreign societies (at best it can be a tool to support political objectives-Berlin Airlift or dropping food to Kurds comes to mind), it is not supposed to be anything other than what it is, pure and simple. There’s no going back to the pre-1917 days, but just because that’s not possible doesn’t mean we cannot have a saner view of what the US military’s role is. You want to fix recruitment? Start with that. Men aren’t reluctant to fight, they are reluctant to spend years watching PowerPoints under military discipline.
Generals belong with their men, not playing politics in DC. Matter of fact, the President himself belongs wherever he-or they-are needed.
It’s interesting to consider that a man as conservative as Diocletian may have seriously been thinking of the likes of Cincinnatus or Sulla despite his conception of the Dominate. One of the things we tend to forget about the ancient world was how profoundly conservative it was, and how we might interpret things like “republican” differently. Even Pope Gregory the Great-as much the last consul of the city of Rome as the first medieval Pope-still unironically talked about “our republic” to the people of Rome as it looked like the world was at an end.
In any case: Diocletian learned what Bismarck did 1600 years later. Don’t create systems that require someone of your abnormal talent level to function. You got to make sure ordinary people can handle it effectively.
Well, maybe he’s a Monsignor.
Romans tore down their own statues, or replaced the heads, every time there was a new emperor. So tearing down statues is nothing new.
A statement offered without any justification.
Why not? Why can’t America mind it’s own business?
Good grief!
The killer’s ENTIRE face would be seen if he wasn’t wearing a mask. He would have been recognized by now by someone who knew him, they’d notify the police who would check known photos of the perp, they’d see that they pics were a match, and this guy’s face and name would be on the news nonstop for a week.
The mask is how the killer planned on staying anonymous. If cops stopped people and arrested them immediately for wearing masks, the doorman would have called the police on the killer who was waiting outside the hotel.
So you think antifa would do what they do without masks. You realize they’d be recognized and arrested later right? Would-be employers all over America would gleefully discriminate against them and refuse to hire them.
Also, many antifi who have attacked someone, being found out, would find themselves being confronted by people when they were alone, unarmed, and not expecting it. The Proud Boy types tend to be significantly bigger than your average antifi.
In the old West, a guy in a mask was assumed to be a cattle rustler or horse theif. In the early 20 century, guys wearing masks in cities would have been assumed to be bank robbers.
This CEO may have been an awful guy. I don’t know, but if we allow people wearing masks to hop on fairly fast electric bikes in cities, so that they can quickly drive through a park to a camera-less alley where they can enter a building, change clothes, put on a hat and fake beard, and casually enter a pre-parked get-a-way car and slide right outta there, there may be an uptick in targeted killing in America.
I haven’t even mentioned some of those “fake face” masks that the CIA has. The apparently peel off with some effort, and them boom, the killer can walk out of a bathroom unrecognizable, with the stretchy-plastic-face flushed down the toilet. All the more sophisticated foreign criminal organizations beginning to work the United States?………
We would be better off making masks illegal.
There are many low income Hasidic Jews (as well as wealthy ones). Spending their time studying the Torah and not receiving a meaningful secular education leaves them kind of short on job skills, not to mention that they have to support very large families. Likewise, it can be difficult for women to work outside of the home if you are taking care of 10 kids.
You can say that this is a sort of self-imposed or self-created poverty but it is still poverty. Certainly it is better that these folks be supported by voluntary charity than by the gubmint (although they receive government support as well). It used to drive my late mother nuts when she would go to the supermarket in Lakewood, NJ (which has a large Orthodox community – Kars4Kids is HQed there) and see able bodied young Jewish men and women paying for their groceries with food stamps.
Apparently the Goyische Kopfs who run the Gentile News Network have trouble distinguishing between Jews and Israel (they don’t seem to be the only ones). The subjects of Kars4Kids and Oorah’s charity are American Jews, not Israelis. A significant segment of the Orthodox community is actively hostile to the State of Israel or at best indifferent to it. “Zionist” is to them a dirty word.
Because, as in war, one can’t just decide “You know, I have an unprecedented global empire, I’m sick of it, let’s get rid of it” and leave it on a whim. At least not without very nasty consequences, for the American people and the world.
There’s a big difference between that and not getting involved in throwing away our resources in conflicts with little to no vital stake for the US when they clearly will be needed elsewhere. Even if we could do it all anymore-and we can’t-why would that be wise anyway? What dumbass gets involved in a four front war unless he absolutely has to for survival?
Everbody who has read the articles by first millennium revisionist and laurent guyenot on this site, can understand this feeling
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/world/americas/haiti-gang-massacre.html
https://archive.is/594Ci
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/world/americas/haiti-dominican-republican-cage-trucks.html
https://archive.is/Qhmle
Everyone in DC makes money by investing in war profiteer companies and then fomenting war. If American politics had any seriously enforced ethics rules regarding investing, the going-on-thirty-year neocon war addiction would end in an hour.
“The killer’s ENTIRE face would be seen if he wasn’t wearing a mask. ”
The law against murder didn’t stop him from committing murder, but you seem to think that a law against masks would have stopped him from wearing a mask. Even if it did, he would have simply altered his plan. People that intent on committing murder will figure out a way.
Good grief indeed.
No, that isn’t true. And who says it would be on a whim? A lot of Americans would love for the US to get out of the Empire business. It wouldn’t be on a whim. It would be a conscious decision to start looking after our own affairs and not attempt to control the entire World.
I wonder whether the stories of Sulla’s sexual shenanigans are true… Oh, and then there’s Tiberius’ sexual proclivities. Both involved boys or men in some combination or other.
I hope your fine article opens a few eyes. Many of those who enthusiastically acclaim Trump seem absolutely determined to ignore the chasm that exists between his words and his deeds, between his grandiose promises and his history of cynical deception.
With specific reference to your paragraphs decrying Trump’s championing of the Deviancy Bloc of homosexuals and trannies, why were none of his “normal” supporters up in arms about his use of “YMCA”—the totemic anthem of faggotry and of its spread via seduction and corruption of teenage boys—as his campaign’s official theme song? Is the entirety of MAGAdom blind and deaf to its content? Or do the normies think that Trump is, for a change, going to stab the deviants in the back instead of his millions of true believers?
Trump’s success is Exhibit A for the contention that democracy is preeminently the form of governance that thrives on human beings’ reluctance to learn anything from the past or from the evidence offered by their senses.
Masks give the perp a hope that if he can physically get away from the scene of the crime, he can ditch the mask and won’t be recognized.
Of course, if one is willing to die themselves, a man can kill just about anybody. I don’t dispute that. If we make masks illegal as we should, few people will be willing to risk open murder in cities that have many cameras because of the risk of their picture being taken. This Luigi Mangione only dropped his mask at a Starbucks, and it was enough that a picture of his face was recognized by a McDonald’s worker in Pennsylvania five days later, who called 911.
I don’t like masks. I seen what masked people got away with during the Floyd riots because they couldn’t be identified. All we needed was a picture to be put on television, and somebody would recognize that face. Once we have a name, cellphone data can usually tell us if that person was in the area at the time the crime occurred.
“I wonder whether the stories of Sulla’s sexual shenanigans are true”
Well, Roman graffiti was always a hoot, esp the stuff with a political bent. Like a man once said, “What great ones do, the less will prate of”. But a reasonable rule is, if Catullus didn’t make jokes about it, then it probably didn’t happen.
I was one of the biggest critics of the masks, to the point where Ron Unz placed severe restrictions on my ability to comment. Fundamentally, I agree with you. Where I disagree is if there is any deterring effect on potential crime. Based on all of the laws that get broken during the commission of capital and or lesser offenses, I find the idea that a mask law would be strictly enforced a dubious claim.
Anyway, it is interesting isn’t it, that so many shootings occur in large cities where video surveillance is ubiquitous and go unsolved. With perpetrators putting much less effort into concealing their identities.
Now that’s some Comprehensive Immigration Reform I can get behind!
Even if he’d worn the mask at all times, keeping the gun is what will sink him.
When I read this, I thought immediately of the quote attributed to Mencken about the perfect state of democracy coming about when the people elect a moron to be President of the United States.
OT, but a keeper…..
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2024/12/during-cold-war-we-classified-entire.html#more
Brrrrr, spooky.
Some men will just have sex with anything, then and now, if there are no social or legal restrictions on doing so. Sulla strikes me as one of them. So, no, I don’t think it’s an invention of Plutarch’s prudish (and for Sulla specifically, overtly hostile) imagination. Seriously: the dude forced every snobby bastard in the Senate to acknowledge his lover as he retired, along with all the other infames who were his friends when he was nothing and the Senatorial class would have nothing to do with him.
Now that’s loyalty for you. No worse enemy, no better friend indeed.
Tiberius, on the other hand, was an arch-conservative who near as we can tell had a very “old Latin” dedication to his first wife that was in short supply by the fall of the Republic. Suffice it to say, the idea he suddenly turned into a degenerate in his 70s should be taken with a grain of salt.
Under privileged is another euphemism for socially dysfunctional families which I doubt would apply to many Hasidic Jews. I grew up in a large family that at some point might have qualified for food stamps in today’s world but the idea of taking government aid was alien to my parents. They grew up in far harsher circumstances.
In one of your most recent Substack posts, you talk about how important it is for officials to follow the rule of law. Is that just when you feel like mentioning it or is it something you truly believe in?
Consider.
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3ld5af7m5p22w
I still think the victims wife seduced her lover to kill him so that she could collect the insurance money.
Sounds like your average Star Wars movie.
Few people know that Sailer leads a double life as a historical novelist.
their obnoxious ads run every half hour on WMAL radio in DC. TV commercials too 🙁
Corvirus: Oh please pay attention me to Steve, PLEEZ look at me….
I always enjoy how you enthusiastically continue to humiliate yourself. Is that an in born trait or something that was taught?
You have said many times that you are an Armenian homosexual. We get it, you be you. But your need for attention is cringe-worthy. Have some dignity man.
“You have said many times that you are an Armenian homosexual.”
Of course, this is disinformation on your part. But it does tell us how brave you are to project your personal affinities.
Oh Corvirus, everyone’s least favorite prancing pink Slav. You are so CAGEY! Unfortunately you’re also suffering from confirmation bias.
Galba, reputedly homosexual, one of the brief wearers of the Purple during the Year of the Four Emperors is worthy of a film far more than Elagabolus, Shirley?
As governor of Hispania he sentenced* a Roman citizen to crucifixion for malversation of funds while the accused was tutor to a minor. When objections were raised about the validity of the sentence, he replied
“Whitewash the cross and proceed”
*From memory of Civil (Roman) Law tutorial many moons ago.
Four Emperors:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/race-and-rome/#comment-6872215
Again, all you have is outright lies. That’s to be expected.
Citations required.
You and your tin cup narrative, you can do better Slavic Sodomite!
“Citations required”
Your entire commenting history on this fine opinion webzine.
And your hatred for your fellow Polish brethren and Slavs in general, a white people, is deplorable.
Denzel Washington, in addition to being the black character inserted in ancient Rome also replaced the white Robert McCall in “The Equalizer” show in 3 movies.
Now there is a new show with a black female as the “equalizer”. (((They))) didn’t even bother to change the name, just feminized it to “Robyn McCall”.
https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81405081?s=a&trkid=13747225&trg=cp&vlang=en&clip=81967527
Interestingly, IRL Denzel has a daughter , in a weird interracial queer gay relationship.
https://face2faceafrica.com/article/fans-stunned-by-height-gap-between-denzel-washingtons-daughter-and-her-wife
The revisions of history and current culture to glorify blacks and gays continue. It is hard to find a new movie or show anymore that doesn’t feature blacks.
Nuh uh
No, your recency bias (and general inanity) is showing.
Netflix just released a show/movie about how negress postal workers won WWII by sorting mail.
No really, that’s the show.