The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
Reddit won in the since that Sparta lost. Nobody tells the story like they’re LOSERS. Sometimes, being the protagonist in a tale is more important than winning.
Actually, the general consensus is that the spartans WERE losers and were culturally and technologically inferior to all their contemporaries and didn’t even have a particularly good record in battle. All of the stuff that lunatics get off on about their training system was mostly about ensuring conformity and obedience from a young age. And the (admittedly deliciously horny) movie that every gym rat worships mostly just highlights one battle that they… actually lost. And then their neighbors won the war.
So… yeah.
Well yeah. I hope I didn’t imply they actually won lol. I’m saying they lost, but when people generally tell that story like in the various movies or a history class lecture, they’re positioned as the good guys. So many many years later, in that all we have are stories, that matters more than winning. Just my opinion I suppose.
Side note: yeah that Gerard Butler movie 😂
Its more that anyone with even a passing knowledge of history that extends beyond “what I read on facebook” more or less think the Spartans were god damned idiots (Oenomaus told no lies…). And praise for Sparta is right up there with “Actually, 1940s German technology was amazing and generations beyond everyone else” in terms of “Da fuq did you just say?”.
Which… actually might not be the most inaccurate here. Maybe people at reddit will notice a change. Odds are most people will get just as angry at the new mods as the old mods and everyone will continue to upvote the same stolen memes every day (just like there are some folk here who think they are on a mission from god to repost every single reddit post they find…).
But I would rather we try to be at least a bit hopeful.
The myth of the Spartan is actually a really interesting one. Mostly it is a mixture of Greek tourism propaganda (so that they can appeal to “manly men” rather than just being about art and statues) and military, generally American, propaganda. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/22/sparta-popular-culture-united-states-military-bad-history/ is not the best article on the subject, but it is easy to digest and I had it handy.
From a military side? It really is all about the indoctrination. They LOVE to build up spartans as these heroic super soldiers because they were trained from birth as warriors. When the reality is that they were indoctrinated into a cult from birth to ensure obedience and conformity. Which… obviously has benefits when you are taking a bunch of teenaged boys and trying to balance unthinking loyalty with the ability to decide how to achieve an objective within a narrow set of parameters. They aren’t being taught to not think about who they are shooting or abducting. They are fighting like heroic spartan warriors!
And then the brainwashed folk come back home, possibly raise some kids, and you get that heroic myth that helped them justify all the war crimes and murder into the brains of little kids who just want to play soldier.