• CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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    12 days ago

    There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was “As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge.”

  • breckenedge@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    Germany could have disavowed the Zimmerman Telegram and avoided or postponed the U.S. entering The Great War, but they fucking owned that shit.

  • Skua@kbin.earth
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    12 days ago

    The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      11 days ago

      I had to look that up, it’s just too good to pass.

      (Cassius Dio, contemporary historian) tells us that the empress teased her companion (the wife of Argentocoxos, a Caledonian chief) by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:

      “We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”

      A bit further below, however

      The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above.

      Sauce - https://senchus.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/julia-and-the-caledonian-women/

      • Skua@kbin.earth
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        12 days ago

        Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I’m afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control

        • Skua@kbin.earth
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          12 days ago

          That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there’s no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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            12 days ago

            TIL. Did the Greeks get less patriarchal over time? In the classical era they were Taliban-tier and complained they even had to see women.

            • Skua@kbin.earth
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              12 days ago

              I’m afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene’s reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    12 days ago

    There’s a lot to choose from, but it’s early so I’ll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      12 days ago

      And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn’t fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.

      The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we’d all be speaking some Australian language or something.

      • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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        11 days ago

        I read about it once. I think it was up to medieval times where sahara had lots of green batches and oasis? Though thats in the range of natural climate change.

        Btw. most Alpine passes were unpassable from 900 to 1300, we had a mini ice age then.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          11 days ago

          Nah, green Sahara ended pretty early in the bronze age. The old kingdom Egyptians were really just getting the tail end of it. It was definitely natural, I don’t think that’s in question; the (non-mini) ice age was simply ending, about on schedule. It would have been a much slower change than what’s happening now.

          There were a few trees that managed to hang on in one area, though, with the last being “accidentally” run over by the colonial-era French.

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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    12 days ago

    In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.

    “A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon, the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys, and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness.”[26]

    During the sign-off theme, the phone began ringing. Houseman picked it up and the furious caller announced he was mayor of a Midwestern town, where mobs were in the streets. Houseman hung up quickly, “[f]or we were off the air now and the studio door had burst open.”[4]: 404

    How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven’t you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?)

    This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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        12 days ago

        No. In fact, I quoted the first-hand accounts of the people in charge of the broadcast.

        Yes, there may have been less of a panic than as advertised, but it wasn’t a gross (or intentional) distortion. The drama was also only broadcast once.

        The offices of the city of Trenton, New Jersey, a location within the dramatization, had its communications paralyzed for 3 hours due to the calls made to ask the city well.

  • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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    12 days ago

    A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said “if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country”…

    …and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.

    Later, some dude was like “screw your catholicism, I don’t like my wife any more, I’ll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife,” and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.

    I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that’s about it.

  • ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io
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    12 days ago

    That North and South Korea maintain a fax line between their countries… which they use almost exclusively to send threats and insults to each other.

    Also related to North Korea, the hilarious fact that Dennis Rodman, former NBA player, is so well liked by the Kim family that he’s basically a diplomat to North Korea, or at least the one they turn to when things really start going badly.

    Proof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/12/20/north-and-south-korea-exchange-faxes-threatening-to-attack-each-other/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-sends-fax-threatening-strike-south-korea-without-notice-flna2d11781034 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-KRTB-4721

    • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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      12 days ago

      Another fun fact about North Korea: They have their own Linux Distro by the name Red Star OS, which has its 3.0 version leaked to the Internet, while the newest known version is 4.0.

      My observations while trying out the leaked 3.0 are:

      *It is a fedora derivative,its package manager made me think it’s something close to CentOS 6.3.

      *It’s visuals are really similar to Mac OS. Perhaps the state official behind this project really liked Mac?

      *Every piece of software installed has its credits removed, they have help prompts that refer to them being made in some sort of university.

      *It leaves strange markings to created files. I couldn’t understand what they do exactly, but I assume it could be used to track the computer that made the files.

      *Their browser does not support https, and does not have English support at all.

      *Packages intended for developers aren’t installed by default, doesn’t have a remote repository but instead was intended to be installed with a physical media drive.

      *Just for fun, I tried to request the Linux kernel’s source code that the developers behind used, as it’s licensed by GPL. I was unsuccessful; which means this is the first time a state sponsored software is violating GPL.

        • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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          11 days ago

          There exists state sponsored Linux distros for various reasons. As far as i can recall China, India and Turkey has their distros available publically. I also remember reading about a distro Russia was working on, but I don’t remember what happened to it. Could be a project to use internally by Russian govt.

  • cynar@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    One of Sir Issac Newton’s famous phrases is

    “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”

    This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!