🔥 Roman Lives Matter! Won't somebody think of poor Guido?
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Remember when inserting members into dead pork was all we had to fear from self-entitled idiots?
I thought that was
s/(inserting)(members)/$2$1/??
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@Lorne_Kates said:
@Ascendant said:
Ottomans
They were wiped out by the Chesterfields.
Because everybody was tired of their bitchin' about being stepped on.
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Well, you'd be wrong.
There are many different overlapping western cultures.
You're in fact kind of illustrating my point here. As I see it, "culture" is sort of a hierarchical notion. As members of the "western" culture, we know it well enough that we distinguish the many different overlapping subcultures. At the same time we tend to overlook the similarities those subcultures share, because we are so used to them that we take them for granted, believing they are "universal". But if we look at cultures which are foreign to us, we don't have the detailed knowledge we'd need to recognize the various subcultures, so we lump them together into e. g. "the black culture". One could start at the level of the "human culture" and follow the hierarchy down to an individual person with their own "private culture", and none of these levels of detail is in any way more "correct" than another.
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You're in fact kind of illustrating my point here.
The hierarchical nature that you see is a product of your own mind. You can select things to emphasise that nature, but the reality is more complicated in that you've got lots of overlaps between things: the edges are not always clear cut, not at all. The problem with strictly hierarchical thinking is that it leads you to try to find — or even to seek to force there to be — clear distinctions within a culture that is actually quite whole in itself and happily crossing some boundary that you happen to think is important but that the people within that culture don't actually mark as a big deal.
Culture isn't fundamentally hierarchic. To treat it as such is a major category error.
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Re the current topic title. Modern Italians are descendants of the Vandals and Ostrogoths, not the Romans. Perhaps "Vandal Lives Matter"?
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Modern Italians are descendants of the Vandals and Ostrogoths, not the Romans.
I think you'll find that it's not that simple, and depends on where you are in Italy. The people round Rome probably are descended from the Romans — I've met a few of them — yet the people up around Milan are likely not. Invasions only rarely changed the racial composition of the peasantry very much; those were the people you wanted (as an invader) to keep around and make you rich, instead of the bunch of local nobles you'd just kicked out/killed.
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Invasions only rarely changed the racial composition of the peasantry very much; those were the people you wanted (as an invader) to keep around and make you rich, instead of the bunch of local nobles you'd just kicked out/killed.
True - even so, I was under the impression that the Gothic War with the Eastern Empire killed much of the roman peasantry in Italy. And Vandal Lives Matter just makes the topic nice and
Also a very interesting thread on reddit about this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hqkhg/how_closely_are_modern_italians_ethnically/
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I was under the impression that the Gothic War with the Eastern Empire killed much of the roman peasantry in Italy.
It really depends on where you are. There's substantial variation between different parts of Italy; that which is true for north is often not at all true for the south, and the Italians will typically insist that everything is much more split up than that.
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I changed the title (after first double-checking it wasn't posted by a certain misanthropic rat).
The previous one was 'Rodian Lives Matter! Won't somebody think of poor Greedo' so I didn't want to change it much (as appears to be the unofficial rule).
To be honest, I was only thinking of Romans as meaning modern Italians from Rome, but I suspect there's a Romani joke in there somewhere as well.
