Via 2rawtooreal2

To start thinking about Roman slavery is to stare into an infinite abyss of deliberate human suffering. The Roman Empire is considered to be one of the genuine slave states in human history, in that, like the antebellum Southern states of America, it could not exist without slavery. Slavery was the social and economic foundation upon which the entire Roman Empire rested. But while the slave states of Louisiana and Virginia lasted 150 years before abolition, the Roman Empire stood on the backs of unimaginable numbers of enslaved men, women and children for almost a thousand years. A thousand years is thirty-four generations of people enslaved to the Romans. A thousand years before the year I wrote this, King Cnut was glaring down the sea. A thousand years is an immense amount of time. And they didn’t just have domestic slaves, they had vast mines across the Empire for silver, lead, gold, iron and copper. Google the Las Médulas mines in Spain and imagine the sixty thousand enslaved people who worked there twenty-four hours a day to produce the gold the Roman Empire demanded, and then multiply that by hundreds of years and hundreds of sites and all those lives that were sent to toil for nothing and join me staring into this bottomless pit of Roman horror. Then picture the near infinite acres of land owned by the Gaius Caecilius Isidoruses and Melanias of the Roman world, each maintained by chain gangs of hundreds of enslaved people. And on top of that were those enslaved in the house, the cooks and cleaners and washers and dressers, the people enslaved by the state who maintained the aqueducts and laid the roads and built all those temples and fora across the vast Empire and fought fires and carried the emperor in his litter. A general estimate (which means, of course, a total guess but a guess from someone I’d trust in a quantitative situation) is that there were between 4.8 and 8.4 million enslaved people in the Roman Empire at any time, with the city of Rome‘s population including anywhere from ten to twenty-five percent enslaved people. Millions and millions and millions of lives, each a person with a heart full of love and hate and envy and joy and aching knees and sore eyes and dreams and thoughts and desires and hopes, all of whom were owned by another person and subject to the most extraordinary violence every day.

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon

Naked Sea Angels (Clione limacina) are small, free swimming snails. The shell has been lost and the foot has been modified into wing-like paddles for swimming.

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Stop putting vaspider on my dash, they're the one who kicked off the hysteria against Palestinian gofundme's leading to people taking back thousands of dollars they've donated and reporting their fundraisers as fraudulent, potentially dooming families to death

look at him go!!

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

A storm rolls over Late Cretaceous Hateg island, nourishing the land and drenching the local wildlife. Featuring: Tethyshadros, Hatzegopteryx, Paludititan, Balaur bondoc, an Enantiornithine, Sabresuchus, and many other critters.

i think that the "i do not control the ____" memes are generally tame and do not lend enough credence to the genuine absurdity of the original line that is

are we out of the woods yet ?

another gravity falls animation! :3 hope yall enjoy!

friends to enemies to lovers is actually something that can be so intimate. i know you i know everything about you i have told you all my deepest secrets and you have told me yours and now i am trying to kill you literally or metaphorically because hate and love are separated by a very thin line and i don’t know which side i am on