Story language being auto-censored?

[zzyzx]

14 hours ago, DailyDi said:

I don't normally swear on here, but in this case it should be known the fucking problem has been fixed,

And [That site] is still censored....  So, I think things are back to "normal".

And why do I fell like bringing up the Gregorian calendar, and when it was established and the additional shift in dates from that.  Na....  back to the subject....

23 hours ago, ValentinesStuff said:

Damnit, I'd forgotten about that site. Now you've reminded me about it. 

Whoops.  (runs away and hides)

[Personalias]

7 hours ago, zzyzx said:

And [That site] is still censored....  So, I think things are back to "normal".

And why do I fell like bringing up the Gregorian calendar, and when it was established and the additional shift in dates from that.  Na....  back to the subject....

Whoops.  (runs away and hides)

Glad that it's fixed.  Still kind of weird that it happened.  But glad that it's fixed.

[Gummybear]

7 hours ago, zzyzx said:

And [That site] is still censored....  So, I think things are back to "normal".

And why do I fell like bringing up the Gregorian calendar, and when it was established and the additional shift in dates from that.  Na....  back to the subject....

Whoops.  (runs away and hides)

 

[littlebopeeper]

15 hours ago, Babypants said:

For the record, there is no year 0.

Thanks for correcting this and the many other mistakes that unfortunately entered this conversation.  I've been to Pompeii, and did visit the suburban baths.  As you say, the murals are "instructive."

[WBDaddy]

11 hours ago, babykeiff said:

Let me be the first to thank and offer congratulations to the group of people for sucessfully derailing this topic from discussing censorship of the word fuck to focusing on the errors of history in how dates might have been recorded.

In my humble opinion, that type of behaviour is obsesssive and/or narcissistic since these people pedantically focus on a irrelavant detail that may or may not be correct depending on which version of history one reads.

Even the site owner answered this:-

... which should have been the last post on the topic, but it seems, to me, that in agreement with

I am not going to add to this as then I might be guilty of what @Gummybear is saying.

Simply - @DailyDi post should have been the last here.

For houskeeping, I will delete this post within 48 hours., and I suggest similar actions occur with the rest of the posts past @DailyDi where it doesn't directly discuss censorship of words

Now that the person who made all those woefully mal-informed references to calendars and dating that sparked this side conversation in the first place has gone back and dirty-deleted them, and DailyDi has confirmed that the original problem is solved, I don't see the harm in folks who are interested in the history of modern calendars and such continuing to discuss them.

Or are you suggesting we censor those people because certain folk are uncomfortable with being reminded that they spewed nonsense masquerading as fact?

[Personalias]

On 10/4/2023 at 8:49 PM, WBDaddy said:

Now that the person who made all those woefully mal-informed references to calendars and dating that sparked this side conversation in the first place has gone back and dirty-deleted them, and DailyDi has confirmed that the original problem is solved, I don't see the harm in folks who are interested in the history of modern calendars and such continuing to discuss them.

Or are you suggesting we censor those people because certain folk are uncomfortable with being reminded that they spewed nonsense masquerading as fact?

Really weird too.  Because this person compared me to a Nazi once, and then when Godwin's law was invoked, they apologized (for the bad argument, not for calling me a Nazi) and then said they wouldn't delete it because they believed that deleting that reference (in their humble opinion) would be trying to hide a mistake.  Interesting how that's changed.  Also interesting that they talk about deleting things posted AFTER the daily di post as the matter should be settled, and then they delete something from BEFORE that update.  It's almost as if they don't actually believe the things they say.    

As for historical calendar stuff, I'm curious: I remember anecdotally hearing about how July and August were named for Julius and Augustus Caesar respectively.  Does that mean that previously the recorded months were just slightly longer?  That would make sense with September and October's roots resembling seven and eight, and them just getting shoved out of the way.  Probably the same for November and December being nine and ten. But I honestly don't know, am curious,  feeling low on google fu spoons, and sometimes it's just nice to learn from someone else.  If my assumptions are correct, I'd also wonder why July and August were shoved in the middle instead of tacked on after December.  Like, make the months shorter, but just add them to the calendar AFTER December.

But then again I may be woefully misinformed on any number of these facts.    

[Babypants]

On the Roman calendar, predictably July and August were originally Quintilis and Sextilis-- remember, for centuries the Roman year began in March and ended in December (10 month calendar).  Januarius (the month of Janus) and Februarius (from Februus, the Etruscan god of purification) came in as part of the calendar reforms.  The Julian calendar, which continues to be used by the Greek Orthodox church to calculate the Easter date, is one of the reforms that Caesar carried out as Dictator in 44 B.C.  The switch from Quintilis to Julius  was a political statement in exactly the same way that his self-deification was political (Marc Antony was the first high priest of the cult of divus Iulius).  In 8 B.C., the emperor Augustus similarly opted to rename Sextilis for himself, and he too was promptly deified at his death.

The Caesarian and Augustan reforms at bottom were an attempt to put the toothpaste back in the tube.  Beginning with Marius late in the second century and accelerating with Sulla early in the first, the Roman armies gradually ceased to be instruments of state, giving their loyalty only to the commanders.  Caesar concluded that the only way to put an end to the civil wars was to make the winner a living god as a point of focus for the loyalty of the army.  As Octavius, in the civil wars of 44-31 Augustus' decisive advantage over Antony and Lepidus was that he was the adoptive son of the divus Iulius.  More conservative than Caesar, in his relationship with the Senate, Augustus walked a very fine line indeed. 

Augustus' only child was his daughter Iulia, whom Augustus married serially to his chosen successors.  Her marriage to his top general, Marcus Agrippa, yielded three sons (Caius, Lucius, and Agrippa Postumus).  Through adoption, Caius and Lucius became sons (filii) of the divus Augustus.  Caius was the designated heir apparent until his death in the East, followed by Lucius, who died under mysterious circumstances when being sent west to Spain.  The exile of the ostensibly insane Agrippa Postumus opened the door for Tiberius, the eldest son of Livia, Augustus' last wife, to ascend the throne in A.D. 14.  The Julio-Claudian dynasty (14-68) was tumultuous because Tiberius and Claudius politically were trying to put the brakes on conversion of the government into an outright monarchy, while in the manner of Caesar the infamous Caligula and Nero wanted to hasten the process, and use Egypt's Ptolemaic system of governance as a new point of reference.  With Nero's suicide, an uneasy compromise followed that endured for more than a century.  The emperor became "first among equals," but the government expanded remorselessly along Ptolemaic lines.  In time, it became larger than the budget could fund, leading logically to progressive devaluation of the currency by reducing the gram weight of the silver coinage, while also increasing the amount of base metal in each coin.  This began with Marcus Aurelius (161-180), whose far flung wars on multiple frontiers emptied the treasury.  Since the government had no gimmicks like deficit spending to throw at the problem, by the time Diocletian came to power late in the third century. Gresham's Law had effectively demonetized the economy, and the empire was in ruins.  The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine were comprehensive, and worked sufficiently well to buy the Empire another century and a half of life.  The critical element was the monetary.  The attention that scholars pay to religious reforms such as the legalization of Christianity is understandable, but largely misplaced.  To put it quite bluntly, for centuries after the Council of Nicaea, Christianity in its various incarnations (there were many) remained an urban cult with virtually no reach into the countryside, where, as Saint Francis of Assisi would discover, Apollo continued to reign supreme.  Any American, looking at the deep divide between the urban "blue" and rural "red" counties, is experiencing today the reality of religious life in the ancient world for long centuries after Diocletian and Constantine came and went.  The major difference is demographic-- the peasant economy was home to roughly 85% of the population, which is certainly not the case in America today.

Hope this answers at least some of the questions lingering from the ongoing discussion of the calendar.  The Julian calendar is actually pretty good, overshooting the mark only to the tune of one day every 128 years.

[Personalias]

59 minutes ago, Babypants said:

Hope this answers at least some of the questions lingering from the ongoing discussion of the calendar.  The Julian calendar is actually pretty good, overshooting the mark only to the tune of one day every 128 years.

It does, thank you.  And it has more than enough tier 3 information that I otherwise lacked (and thus google searches would not have been very helpful) so that I can delve a bit and confirm for myself anything that I cared to double check or read deeper into.

[Babypants]

24 minutes ago, Personalias said:

It does, thank you.  And it has more than enough tier 3 information that I otherwise lacked (and thus google searches would not have been very helpful) so that I can delve a bit and confirm for myself anything that I cared to double check or read deeper into.

I might add that inserting yourself into the calendar was a de facto claim to being a living god.  Augustus did this in 8 B.C. to make it clear to the Senate that there would be no restoration of the Republic-- the monarchy was here to stay.  By this point in time, we know that both Caesar and Augustus were being worshiped as gods inside the legionary camps, which was making life increasingly difficult for Augustus back in Rome.  In essence, Augustus and the Senate cut a deal.  The Senate would look the other way while the army worshiped the Caesars, and formal deification would come within hours of Augustus' death.  Hopefully, you can now see why the army idolized Caligula, and so despised Claudius that he decided to conquer Britain in order to earn some street cred in the ranks.  Nero sealed his fate with an army predisposed to love him by letting army pay fall into arrears to pay for the grandiose spending projects he was carrying out in Rome.