iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

But by college there should be something beyond literal children's books.

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Dear gods. Even by then there should be something else. Even as a child my friends and I at least had Percy Jackson.

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All this being said, I do not think I would give my hypothetical child Harry Potter to read; there are better options out there, and it would be better not to let the bigotries you lay out go unexamined. And, at any rate, I would want my child to have different cultural touchstones.

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Worse still, in many ways rather than simply choosing to wallow in ignorance, she has become an active bigot. I think that Harry Potter, if written today, would go far beyond the background bigotries and questionable attitudes of the British middle class and be little more than a racist screed.

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But all else being equal I am not sure that they are so different from Tolkien's orcs and his description thereof or most of the field of 90s children's media. And therein is one of my condemnations of Rowling's character; she not only was ignorant, but actively chooses to remain ignorant.

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Brian O'Connor @johnnybesad.bsky.social · 2h

TBQH the names seem like small fry; the mark of an ignorant but not necessarily hateful mind. Stronger cases are made with, say, the goblins (who at least reproduce Jewish stereotypes) or the house elves (which are probably the most problematic single element of the series).

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Reposted by RoninMacbeth 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇻🇪

Im sure youve seen it, but that is pretty much the O'Toole/Burton movie, the lust O'Toole's Henry feels for Burton's Beckett is cranked up to 11 in every scene theyre in together

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...in the world who disliked something most other people liked. For my part, while almost all my friends love it, I find Rogue One tedious and mediocre, so I can believe that you didn't like Harry Potter.

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Rowling is hardly Tolkien; she does not seem to agonize over her world in the same way, and she is not a particularly thoughtful author. But I do think that much of the claim that it was always bad or evil seems like posthoc justification. Not all, mind! You would hardly be the only person...

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Yeah there are deeply problematic elements to it, but I think that it was basically decent (insofar as I remember it; again, I have not read the books since I was a kid) and it at least touches on the notion that the Wizarding World is a fucked-up and exploitative society.

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Things take a while to trickle out of the academy to the general public. You'll find people on r/byzantium repeating what is seen as new wisdom that Bury talked about more than a century ago.

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There's certainly much to be said about how a constant of western ideology is a rejection of and disgust towards Byzantium, but that can be (indeed should be) a separate debate from preserving the honor of the unbroken line of emperors.

They are! I mean here we are eating from the bowl right now, I just think it's important to keep in mind, especially as so much of this discussion occurs on fora where this is taken seriously by LARPers re-enacting old debates of a dead ideology.

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I think these questions mattered to people trying to establish some claim to the legacy of the Roman Empire, especially to those trying to lay claim to Constantinian/Justinianic ideas of a universal Christian imperium. But I am neither a monarchist nor a Christian, and so it means nothing to me.

Does it really matter if Constantine Dragases was the last in an unbroken line stretching back to Augustus? I don't think so. Constantine was the emperor of a people called the Romans, thus he was Emperor of the Romans.

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I'm slightly more willing to entertain the notion that the line of emperors was broken by 1204 and that the Palaiologan empire was a new Roman Empire; ultimately I think questions of continuity are parlor discussions; fun but not meaningful, the potato chips of history.

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I exclude Baldwin II because I think it's absurd to call the Latin squatters stripping Constantinople for the copper wiring part of the Byzantine tradition of imperial rule. I do have some standards. Yes it's arbitrary but I don't really think including Baldwin II is helpful.

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I say that he reigned from childhood, but only ruled a bit later on. I like to use the reign/rule distinction to differentiate between co-emperors and their senior, active colleagues.

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I know this seems as if I am retreating into absurdity to stubbornly defend a lost point. I prefer to see it as acknowledging that real history can be absurd. To paraphrase the great Dr. Harry Turtledove: "fiction has to be plausible, history only needs to happen."

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Wasn't crowned for those two months, doesn't count.

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Look I'll admit it's a stretch but he was technically emperor by himself so, eh? I mean if not him then who was emperor? He had the title and he sat the throne, metaphorically at least.

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I will say, however, that I do not include the rest of Heraclius and Martina's inbred brood (so no Davids or Martins)

I do! He was emperor, he reigned (however briefly) uncontested at least for a while. Same reason I'm not including Heraclonas.

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Procopius (usurper) - Wikipedia

The historian? Almost certainly couldn't. But Procopius the maternal cousin of Julian had a decent shot. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procopi...

en.wikipedia.org

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Indeed; quite a few opportunities for an Emperor Bardas, though most are probably mutually exclusive (e.g., we might not get Bardas Skleros and Bardas Phokas had Bardas the Caesar seized power from his nephew Michael III).

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worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It's funny to think about Roman/Byzantine imperial names that just sort of fell through the cracks, especially names held either by failed usurpers or members of the imperial family who didn't make it. Procopius, George, Thomas, Demetrios, Niketas all come to mind, though there are surely others.

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Reposted by RoninMacbeth 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇻🇪

Liberty Biberty has passed away. He was mistaken for a tennis ball and accidentally beaten to death. Rest In Piberty.

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Sam @samd.bsky.social · 5h

me in bologna this summer: “I am so excited to walk around this beautiful city with my wife and eat the most declious pasta on earth” twitter Nazis in bologna: “I am furious about the levels of race mixing in this city”

Lee Kuan Yimby • @LeeKuanYimby • 4h
I was at a bus station in Bologna at night and there was hundreds of people and straight up nobody was
Italian.
13
17 3
936
企
vittorio O
@IterIntellectus
X.com
it's so much worse than people are being told man

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Elizabeth Anne, PhD @lacksauthority.bsky.social · 6h

never the wrong time for this classic

Screenshot of a tweet by @RobbtKraft reading “scientist: "does everyone here know what Watson and Crick discovered?"
me from back of room: "Rosalind Franklin's notes"”

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RoninMacbeth 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇻🇪 @roninmacbeth.bsky.social · 6h

It's a decent bet that any given Republican is corrupt.

steviebaby🫡 @steviebaby.bsky.social · 6h

Reposted by RoninMacbeth 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇻🇪

gavin newsom smiling, with the caption "why would i deceive you"

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RoninMacbeth 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇻🇪 @roninmacbeth.bsky.social · 6h

We really do deserve better historical fiction shows.

Abba Irik @lamproterotatos.bsky.social · 6h

Reposted by RoninMacbeth 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇻🇪

I dare a professor to make their reading list from this but only with polemics about Christianity.

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Djinn & Tonic @djinnandtonic.bsky.social · 7h

This is good on Chuck, but "no nominees" also means the Baileys' Republican country club friends, too

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finrodsauronvorecommissionfolderabsurdres @yungdreyfusard.bsky.social · 8h

any time i get to look at a group of christians and go 'you people are all basically the same right' i immediately leap at the opportunity. methodism is basically the same thing as russian orthodoxy, right? both of them have bishops!

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RoninMacbeth 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇻🇪 @roninmacbeth.bsky.social · 7h

I'm sorry but "Malfoid" truly is a JK Rowling-esque name, it's too perfect.

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Reposted by RoninMacbeth 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇻🇪

☠️𝔖𝔭𝔬𝔬𝔨𝔶 𝔎𝔯𝔦𝔰🦇 @freydalpishti.bsky.social · 7h

It's very simple: When I love Kingdom of Heaven, it's due to the moving portrayal of the struggle for meaning and maintaining your faith when crimes are committed in its name. When everyone else loves it, I assume it's because they want to do right-wing crusader edits on TikTok.

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Adults should not only let it go because there are more books out there for us, but also because Rowling uses the wealth from that franchise for her genocidal crusade against trans people, and being an adult means learning how to take responsibility and not support those things where possible.

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I think Harry Potter was a perfectly fine children's book series (the "it was always bad" line feels at least a bit self-serving) and a series of movies that ranged from "pretty good" to "perfectly mediocre," but they are children's books, at most YA literature. Adults need to let it go.

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It would also almost certainly spike territorial tensions with, say, Turkey.