Doing all these variations of "sparta lord of the rings GoT blog" and just getting links to IMDB pages...
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Yeah, it's really tricky to talk about this because one of two things can be true:
A) there could actually be a culture of people who need to hear about this and you're just fortunate enough not to be embedded in that culture, or
B) maybe it's the Twitter phenomenon where a news article reads a tweet that was liked 5 times and then makes a controversy about what society believes now. Or maybe I'm embedded in such a narrow sub-culture where I'm more likely to see wild takes about the past.
And it can sometimes be really hard to make a credible argument in either direction. I can't think of any evidence I can give that I see this as a problem other than... anecdotally I see it. But obviously that's not evidence.
Happy to help, I certainly get a lot of mileage from that one:) A convenient one is also the series on the Fremen mirage, which is another trope tough guys like to throw around: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-fremen-mirage . It’s actually related to the point you were making. These people like to talk about the fall of Rome and decadence as if what came before was a kind of golden age, but I don’t think their reasoning prowess goes far enough to actually come up with some arguments as to what was better before and why. They are focused on what went bad (disintegration, obviously because men were weak, women were rebellious, and there were immigrants).
> maybe it's the Twitter phenomenon where a news article reads a tweet that was liked 5 times and then makes a controversy about what society believes now. Or maybe I'm embedded in such a narrow sub-culture where I'm more likely to see wild takes about the past.
Yeah, it’s difficult to gauge this sort of things now because Twitter is such an echo chamber, and the most vocal communities are not the largest. I don’t claim to be perfectly informed either, far from it. Imperfect as it is, mainstream media provides a better view, I think. The future will be interesting if Twitter disintegrates.
Ah yes, you’re certainly right about those, good point. They are indeed a good example of what you say (and of course their specific kind of delusion has been convincingly shown as divorced from any kind of historical reality *).
> All I can say is that my experience doesn't match yours, and I do run into people who glorify history, and I do run into people who glorify Rome.
Using history for propaganda purposes is not that rare, see e.g. Putin doing it with the old Russian empire right now. But my understanding is that they even the people buying into this are happy to rant about how great their country used to be but would not want to actually live at the time they glorify. Even Russian nationalists know how bad life was for the vast majority of the population under Catherine the Great. It’s usually some aspects they want to emulate, it the whole experience. Of course there is the counter-example you mentioned of spartanophile who have too much confidence in their manliness and toughness and who would not be against raping a helot or killing a wolf every now and then…
* https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta