I love how you can always identify when a bad-faith argument is coming on Twitter because the person about to vomit it at your face has an Ancient Roman avatar or handle, as though human culture peaked with a violent, slave-owning, collapsed republic that hadn't invented pants.

These are, generally, the same people who get mad whenever a non-white person plays a Centurion on "Doctor Who," and refuse to acknowledge that 1) large portions of the Roman empire were nonwhite 2) "Whiteness" as a concept didn't even exist yet

These are also, of course, the same people who think that they can just rattle off entries from the Wikipedia list of Logical Fallacies and if they score enough Debate Me Cowards Points you have to acknowledge their moral rightness, or something.

Incidentally, there is actually something called the "Fallacy Fallacy," which is the fallacious belief that just because someone used a logical fallacy in their reasoning that their conclusion is wrong, which is not so.

Like, arguing on Twitter is like saying "grass is green" and they say "prove it" and you're like "you're a fucking idiot, that's why" and they say "ad hominem!!" like they found a buried treasure and that proves they were right that grass is red, but it's unrelated.

Like, just because you invoked a latin phrase doesn't make your argument inherently correct. Ancient doctors wore masks because they believed foul odors made you sick. Their reasoning was wrong but their conclusion was correct, you have to approach those things separately.

You're right, Guy-With-Latin-Screen-Name, I did use an ad hominem attack in my response to you. Because you're a bad-faith fuckhead who doesn't deserve my calm reasoning.

Speaking Latin doesn't make you smart. The Catholic Church spoke Latin when they insisted the sun revolved around the Earth.

Pliny the Elder spoke Latin when he justified his decision to go check out what Mount Vesuvius was doing, shortly before he got roasted alive.

It's like all these Internet Intellectuals watched all the Harry Potter movies and internalized the idea that stuff that sounds like Latin is a literal magic word you can use to manifest the reality you want.

Seriously though, when people told Pliny the Elder not to go to Pompeii he said (in Latin) "Fortune favors the brave."

He might as well have said "I'm Pliny the Elder and welcome to Jackass!"

Of course, the deification of Rome all goes back to the idea that Rome exemplifies "Western" culture and the insistence that democracy, music, literature, art, all goes back to Rome.

It's racism in a silly toga.

A ton of the stars in the sky have Arabic names because the ancient Arab world was a greater hub of science and learning than Rome.

And we calculate their distance from us using Arabic numerals because Roman numbers are fucking stupid.

The word "algebra" comes from an arabic phrase that meant "the reunion of broken parts," like "al-jebr" or something like that.

But anybody with a Roman Helmet Avatar has to believe that the "dream that was rome" was the peak of humanity, and they have to believe a bunch of wrong stuff about Rome to make that work, chiefly that Rome was a racially-pure utopia.

"Rome was the greatest civilization in the history of the human race!"

"According to whom?"

"...well, writers in Ancient Rome, mostly. And like... Italians."