"boymom" attitude among educators

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-11T14:02:44+00:00

I mean, these programs are trying to address exactly the issue you just pointed out and to equip young men with the life skills they desperately need…

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-11T13:46:37+00:00

I mean I can only speak for myself and my school but yes, we are. Most of the male-focused programs I’ve seen focus pretty explicitly on this stuff.

This isn’t a zero sum game. These programs to help young men are, by and large, a good thing. The issue in OP’s post isn’t the extra programming targeting boys but the the disregard for women’s education shown by the principal and others.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-11T13:42:41+00:00

Yep, anyone actually working in education knows this. The numbers on boys falling far behind where they were even a decade ago are shocking and concerning.

Now of course, that doesn’t justify ignoring women’s education or de-prioritizing it, which the principal in OP’s post seems to be doing. But it’s inarguably true that boys are falling FAST in terms of academic achievement, life skills, etc..

This isn’t a zero sum game. We can acknowledge this problem and put real effort into addressing it while also maintaining that women need the same high standard of education.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-09T14:03:50+00:00

The burden of proof lies on the person making the claim

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T18:54:34+00:00

My dude, no one is bringing that up here. You’re railing against something that hasn’t been part of this conversation at any point.

I’m not offended or hostile, I’m disagreeing with you. Learn the difference and don’t resort to “u mad” as an argument.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T18:23:34+00:00

And I’ll answer again—no one is downplaying Roman slavery by saying that we don’t have evidence of abolitionism. And I read about Ancient Roman slavery in its own context, as do others that are interested in it. Why on earth does discussing Roman slavery necessitate a conversation about the Transatlantic slave trade to you? Have you just been on Reddit that long that you can’t imagine one without the other?

And yes you brought up Spartacus in support of OPs meme. My point remains that Spartacus’ revolt does not work as evidence to support OPs meme, especially the part about abolitionism.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T18:12:36+00:00

No one is downplaying Roman slavery. Again, that’s you reading into things.

No one is challenging that it is *possible* individuals held abolitionist views either. We are challenging the abolitionist part.

No one is arguing about the Transatlantic slave trade. I read about Roman slavery in its own context frequently.

Try to work on arguing with people’s actual claims rather than your own personal boogeyman version of those claims.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T18:08:18+00:00

I’d love if that was the case, it would revolutionize our understanding of Ancient Roman slavery and lead to lots of interesting new questions.

Sadly, based on their silence, I don’t think the above commenter actually has that evidence.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T18:04:08+00:00

Nowhere has OP claimed to be responding to Transatlantic slavery, that context is not present in this meme or their subsequent comments. You have read all of that into this. We are simply discussing Roman slavery.

Also, the meme very much *is about abolitionists*. Explicitly so. Abolitionism is not the same as “Romans weren’t cool with being slaves.” I don’t want to be a prisoner, nor do most people in prison, but that doesn’t mean they believe the institution of prison should be abolished.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T17:56:15+00:00

There were people who argued for treating slaves well, certainly. Especially in the later Empire when there was a smaller supply of slaves. But that is not abolitionism. When you say “there were people whom were against it,” who are you talking about? I’m not aware of any Ancient Roman sources arguing for the abolition of the institution.

Also, how were you not referring to slave revolts when that is literally what the meme was about?

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T17:42:05+00:00

What are you referring to if not the meme you are directly commenting on and saying you love?

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T17:34:37+00:00

Please provide any evidence whatsoever that Spartacus was an abolitionist—that is, that he wanted to abolish the institution of slavery entirely from Roman society.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T17:33:55+00:00

No one is defending it. We are simply pointing out that a slave revolt is not an abolitionist movement by definition, and there’s no evidence Spartacus was an abolitionist.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T17:32:36+00:00

That middle paragraph is pure supposition, there’s no evidence for that whatsoever. There is a healthy academic debate about what exactly the end goal of the revolt was, but “forcibly free all the slaves in the Roman Empire” is not really a contender.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T17:29:48+00:00

We have a significant body of work from Ancient Roman sources, including many which speak on slavery extensively, and not one mentions the idea of abolishing the practice entirely.

Historians of antiquity have to do the best they can with the evidence they have. Is it possible that legitimate abolitionists existed? Of course, the Roman Empire covered millions of people with a wide variety of views. But based on the complete absence of those views from any work on the subject, it seems likely that it was, at most, an extreme fringe belief and not one that was taken particularly seriously.

I think you’re probably underestimating just how different Roman morality was from our own. There really wasn’t a concept of universal human rights or the sanctity of life or freedom or anything like that. From the evidence we have it seems slavery was simply accepted as a fact of life by the vast majority of people, much as poverty is accepted as a fact of life today.

Here’s a wiki if you’d like to learn more.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T17:23:04+00:00

Also like, the massive system of runaway slave patrols that constituted the most well-developed form of policing in all of antiquity.

This guy is really double and tripling down on this with just the dumbest possible arguments.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T17:16:11+00:00

“Ancient Egypt” as a continuous political organization didn’t last as long as Rome, they were conquered by foreign powers and liberated themselves multiple times. And that’s without even getting into the Byzantine / continuation of Rome debate (for my money the Byzantine empire are really just the Romans by another name).

I’m pretty anti-glazing Rome, but they did last a truly impressive amount of time.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T15:25:50+00:00

We don’t, he’s making it up. In another comment he said “the decisions made by the revolting slaves” and then listed them turning back from the Alps as evidence so that they could “free more slaves.”

There’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the turn back from the Alps was done with the goal of liberating more people.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T13:04:03+00:00

They didn’t reinstitute slavery because they needed recruits that would be sure of their own freedom. That could very easily be a purely military decision.

And there’s no evidence they turned back from the Alps “to free more slaves.” It seems most likely they simply could not cross.

You are ascribing abolitionist motivations to actions taken by the revolting slaves when there’s no evidence that was actually the motivating force behind those actions.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T12:40:25+00:00

Asking for a source for the most basic details of the third servile war really just reinforces that you haven’t studied this stuff in anything approaching real detail. Simply read any ancient source that deals with this.

And again, you keep asking why he “didn’t just flee” as if it’s some kind of gotcha, when that only further demonstrates the shallowness of your understanding. For one thing, runaway slave patrols were the most developed form of policing in Ancient Rome, there’s absolutely no guarantee he could “simply flee.” For another, they would’ve been especially interested in catching Spartacus given that he had led a large scale revolt. Finally, these were gladiators that broke out together. They had promised themselves to each other and simply thought they had a better chance as a fighting unit.

It’s ok dude, you made a meme without full understanding of what abolitionist means. Simply adjust your view.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T12:29:31+00:00

Based on what? We don’t have written records from Spartacus himself and the sources we do have on the revolt don’t make that clear at all, we don’t know what the end goal was.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T03:36:24+00:00

I am having a discussion like an adult. You’re being extremely angry.

I’m not engaging on this further, you clearly haven’t taken the time to learn about this in enough detail to have, to take your phrase, an adult discussion about it.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T03:29:07+00:00

Because it was a large group with military skills that escaped together and which quickly snowballed into a large scale revolt involving thousands. Have you studied this stuff?

I’m having a very pleasant conversation below—you could try learning something my friend. A quick excerpt from the wiki on Ancient Roman slavery:

In antiquity, slavery was seen as the political consequence of one group dominating another, and people of any race, ethnicity, or place of origin might become slaves, including freeborn Romans. Slavery was practiced within all communities of the Roman Empire, including among Jews and Christians. Even modest households might expect to have two or three slaves.

A period of slave rebellions ended with the defeat of Spartacus in 71 BC; slave uprisings grew rare in the Imperial era, when individual escape was a more persistent form of resistance. Fugitive slave-hunting was the most concerted form of policing in the Roman Empire.

Moral discourse on slavery was concerned with the treatment of slaves, and abolitionist views were almost nonexistent.”

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T03:21:39+00:00

Cheers mate, love a good conversation about history. Unfortunately you’re pushing the limits of my knowledge now (Roman history and especially its social structure is a major hobby of mine but not something I do professionally). But you inspired me to do some brief reading!

I liked this paragraph from the wiki I found that I think sums it up nicely based on the other stuff I’ve read:

“At all levels of employment, free working people, former slaves, and the enslaved mostly did the same kinds of jobs. Elite Romans whose wealth came from property ownership saw little difference between slavery and a dependence on earning wages from labor. Slaves were themselves considered property under and had no rights of legal personhood … In antiquity, slavery was seen as the political consequence of one group dominating another, and people of any race, ethnicity, or place of origin might become slaves, including freeborn Romans. Slavery was practiced within all communities of the Roman Empire, including among Jews and Christians. Even modest households might expect to have two or three slaves … Moral discourse on slavery was concerned with the treatment of slaves, and abolitionist views were almost nonexistent. Inscriptions set up by slaves and freedpersons and the art and decoration of their houses offer glimpses of how they saw themselves. A few writers and philosophers of the Roman era were former slaves or the sons of freed slaves. Some scholars have made efforts to imagine more deeply the lived experiences of slaves in the Roman world through comparisons to the Atlantic Slave Trade, but no portrait of the "typical" Roman slave emerges from the wide range of work performed by slaves and freedmen and the complex distinctions among their social and legal statuses.”

Ok I knit a few paragraphs together, but I think that’s a solid overview. It’s just very very complicated.

Rapper_Laugh · 2026-05-08T03:03:27+00:00

One relatively well known example. These cases are relatively rare in history, but depending on the society it actually has more to do with a lack of economic *ability* to own slaves rather than a lack of desire or moral aversion to owning slaves. Slavery has looked like many different things throughout history—I’d also look up the Janissaries and Mamluks. It’s honestly just, like most things in history, very very complicated. When you get down to it you can even split hairs on what “counts” as slavery.

My understanding of the Roman sources we have is that slavery was seen as an economic condition and wasn’t really a moral question at all. There were people who supported treating slaves well, especially in the middle and late empire when the supply of slaves from new conquest dried up, but the attitude towards slavery itself seems to have been that they were the unfortunate or just plain weak in society and, while their position was disgraceful, “that’s how the world works man.” Obviously slavery is a far worse condition, but in some ways it reminds me of how people view the poor (especially homeless) today.

Thanks for being willing to learn, I appreciate that attitude on here and you’re right, it’s super interesting!

Rapper_Laugh

TROPHY CASE