AbouBenAdhem

In addition to looking for the killer, police are still searching for a motive as to why someone would kill Thompson.

This is definitely where they need to focus their resources first.

Thanks—I made the mistake of going directly to the journal’s site and searching there.

Some impressions after quickly reading the paper:

• They start with the assumption that iron-age warriors took stimulants before battle (based on a comparison to other selected cultures, rather than any direct evidence) and look for any possible relevant artifacts, rather than starting with the artifacts and trying to deduce their use from the context of the finds

• They present no corroborating evidence like chemical residues or association with containers that might have held stimulants. They do mention a type of wooden box found in other graves, but no suggestion that the occurrences are correlated; they also mention metal containers found in female graves—but since the spoonlike artifacts are only found with male burials, there’s clearly a negative correlation.

• If stimulant use were as widespread as the prevalence of the artifacts suggests, you’d expect some mention by contemporary Romans or Greeks (especially given the famous description of cannabis use among the Scythians by Herodotus, and the fondness of later historians for imitating him), or some survival into medieval practice or folklore

• They mention a number of psychoactive plants based on their potential availability, not evidence of actual use—and not all of them are stimulants, or appropriate for inhalation.

• There’s no suggestion that the spoons were a standard size, as would be expected if they were intended for measuring drug doses.

In short, the paper seems a lot more speculative than the Newsweek article implies.

So they say this study is in Praehistorische Zeitschrift, but they don’t link to it, or give the issue, or the date, or the title of the paper, or the names of the authors? And they don’t ask any other historians or archeologists for an opinion?

Getting the street wrong is how we know it was him.

Pretty sure that’s Donald Trump—he even discussed his plan to shoot a man on 5th Avenue.

Drift skates and a crow whistle.

Ishtar.

Non-title-gore version:

Trump nominates Jared Isaacman—Shift4 CEO, commercial astronaut, and Musk friend—to be next NASA administrator.

There are three distinct concepts I think you’re confusing:

• The idea of biological races. Yeah, any given culture’s definition of “race” is historically contingent and biologically incoherent. I think you get that and are assuming that’s all there is to it.

• Race as a correlative of ethnicity. There are some ethnicities whose members tend to have darker skin colors or other physical traits, and people conflate skin color and ethnicity. Ethnicity (as a set of cultural institutions) is meaningful to many people, and some of them interpret a disregard for “race” as a disregard for their ethnicity, or as an attempt to suppress ethnic identity.

• Race as a social construct. When the above ideas permeate a society, people with different skin colors experience systemically different treatment—even in the absence of actual biological or ethnic distinctions. So people with similar skin colors can be grouped on the basis of those shared experiences, and the different behaviors resulting from those experiences feed back into society’s conceptions of biological race and ethnicity. And it doesn’t suffice to counteract such social constructs by ignoring them—social behavior is taken for granted unless people make a conscious effort to reevaluate it.

Homosexuality in Rome was taboo, except as a form of domination between an owner and his slaves.

More precisely, homosexual sex was seen in two distinct roles (“top” and “bottom”), and only the latter was taboo.

I have no idea how protection for endangered colony insects works, but it might make the most sense to just protect the hive and queen instead of every individual colony member.

The existence of these laws implies the existence of an institution to dictate and enforce them.

The place where these kinds of things fall apart, IMO, ultimately comes not from issues concerning the interactions of individual people, but from issues concerning the interactions of people with institutions.