Barley was a sign of degradation and poverty, but the dietary regimens of gladiators were often quite expensive. Pescatarianism was highly regarded by the Romans for both health and cultural reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haudenosaunee#Government

https://collections.lacma.org/object/76652

https://collections.lacma.org/object/83039

https://collections.lacma.org/object/62754

https://www.khm.at/en/artworks/spiralring-mit-zwei-buesten-325431

This was before the Hawaiian King learned to go Super Saiyan

Interestingly enough, there used to be a relatively large partially-Black (“Zanj”) population in Iraq and the Levant!

Despite the Arabian peninsula being culturally important to Arab peoples, it couldn’t support a large population of slaves, because it couldn’t support a large population of… anyone, really, until the discovery of a vast wealth of oil reserves in the mid-20th century.

For those unaware, the A-10’s main gun, the GAU-8 30mm autocannon, had to have an entire aircraft designed around it - the A-10 - just to have an aircraft that wouldn’t destabilize itself or shake to pieces by the force of firing the gun! So unless we’re making that drone beefy af…

Slaves imported from Central Asia were highly valued for their riding expertise - and since cavalry was a key part of Islamic armies, slaves from Central Asia often ended up as soldiers.

On the other hand, most European slaves came from the Balkans or the Caucasus, both mountainous regions with… long histories of clan feuding and warrior/honor cultures. As such, they too often made excellent soldiers.

Slaves from Africa were plentiful, due to the extreme political disunity (and thus constant warring) in African polities, but generally from a wide variety of cultures, and so garnered less of a ‘reputation’ for suitability to certain tasks.

… don’t ask about the process of making eunuchs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamehameha_I#Aliʻi_Moʻi_of_the_Hawaiian_Islands

The origins of the Law of the Splintered Paddle are derived from before the unification of the Island of Hawaiʻi. In 1782 during a raid, Kamehameha caught his foot in a rock. Two local fishermen, fearful of the great warrior, hit Kamehameha hard on the head with a large paddle, which broke the paddle. Kamehameha was stunned and left for dead, allowing the fisherman and his companion to escape. Twelve years later, the same fishermen were brought before Kamehameha for punishment. The king instead blamed himself for attacking innocent people, gave the fishermen gifts of land and set them free. He declared the new law, “Let every elderly person, woman, and child lie by the roadside in safety”.[36]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster_War

The Lobster War (also known as the Lobster Operation; Portuguese: Guerra da Lagosta; French: Conflit de la langouste) was a dispute over spiny lobsters that occurred from 1961 to 1963 between Brazil and France. The Brazilian government refused to allow French fishing vessels to catch spiny lobsters 100 miles (160 km) off Brazil’s northeastern coast[5] by arguing that lobsters “crawl along the continental shelf”. The French maintained that “lobsters swim” and so they could be caught by any fishing vessel from any country.[6]

Bayonet production committee is waiting on the requisite permission forms to start the assembly line up again (it has been eleven months and counting)

Explanation: The Roman Republic had a strange capacity to raise troops seemingly out of thin air whenever they suffered massive defeats. One historian of the time compared the Republic’s capacity to raise new armies to ‘water gushing from a fountain.’

The real reasons for this are multifaceted, but in the briefest sense, could be considered the core values of the Roman Republic.

Romans believed that they were born as a city of exiles and outsiders, and while they could be immensely chauvinist as to whose ways were better, this also meant that they were generally willing to accept and assimilate outsiders who ‘wanted in’. This seems unexceptional to our eyes, but in antiquity, where many city-states had populations of ‘foreigners’ who had resided in the city for generations but were never granted the opportunity to become ‘real’ citizens, this was an exceptional advantage. So if there was a shortage of Romans all of a sudden, a little bending of the usual rules to ‘create’ new ones was very much in the cards!

The Romans also believed that their polity was for the good of the people. Again, this sounds unexceptional to our ears, but in antiquity, was positively radical. Not only did the Romans envision their Res Publica as working for the good of non-citizens (if without their input, conveniently) as well as citizens, but also, the Roman citizen body was much broader than most contemporary regimes. Athens, for example, the shining model of Classical democracy, only about ~10% of the city’s population were citizens. In the Roman Republic, it’s generally considered that over 50% of the city was made of citizens. For this reason, a very large percentage of people felt that they had a real stake in the survival of their Res Publica - part of the government, not just ruled by it.

And another was the aforementioned chauvinism. While not an unusual value in societies of antiquity, Roman pride and arrogance was noted as particularly intense even by contemporaries, and nothing stings quite like wounded pride. What, are you going to let a bunch of OUTSIDERS humiliate OUR Republic, citizen!? GET OUT THERE AND TEACH THOSE BASTARDS A LESSON THEY’LL NEVER FORGET!

Explanation: In the Soviet Union under the dictator Joseph Stalin, deportation of ethnic groups who were deemed in some way troublesome or ‘disloyal’ was common. Many were killed in the process. The usual destination of those who were not sent to GULAG in Siberia was the Central Asian republics, in the hopes of ‘diluting’ the native culture and encouraging easily controlled sedentary settlements without having to do any of the hard stuff that might make sedentary life appealing, like ‘infrastructure’ or ‘decent housing’.

In some ways, Tacitus made the blueprint for it, even. He relays a lot of ethnographic data impartially, but whenever he starts talking about values of the vague ‘barbarians’ in contrast to Rome, they conveniently are the mirror image of ‘decadent civilization’ and in agreement with all of Tacitus’s critiques of Roman society.

Context From Original OP:

(…)

My husband was twenty-five years old.

For a young man of twenty-five who should well understand the ways of yin and yang, we have shared the night for six or seven years now, yet I have never once experienced the joy beneath the blankets.

(…)

In terms of outward appearance, my so-called husband looks just like any other man with his face, body, and beard, but when it comes to the matters of the bedroom, he is no different from a monk.

Although he possesses a physical form like a standing tree, he has size but no strength; he hesitates like a timid tiger, proving less effective than the sting of a bee or an insect.

Everyone calls him a useless general.

It is a matter of simple logic that if a general cannot wield his martial arts, the Hangu Pass will never open on its own.

Crossing the Lu River under the cover of night to venture deep into barren lands was a strategy deployed by Zhuge Liang for his military campaign.

However, my husband—who is like a bearded woman—simply stops because he does not know the art of marital union.

(…)

-A casebook of civil complaints, 19 century

This is actually less unusual than one might expect! In societies without no-fault divorce laws, “My husband doesn’t even perform the one duty I, his wife, actually AM expected to receive” pops up from time-to-time as a socially-accepted reason for divorce!

USA: “Better Islamist than Soviet!”

USSR: “Better Islamist than Western!”

[Islamists gain prominence in the region]

Superpowers:

Honestly, I’d put more blame on the USA than the Soviet Union for this. The Sovs were at least alright with aligning with Arab nationalist Ba’athist regimes, while the USA’s increasing alignment with Israel forced them against Ba’athist regimes, which generally meant supporting Islamists.

tbf, Tacitus also did praise the Germanic tribes, but he did so as a means of contrast with his own ‘decadent’ Roman society which had gotten too used to ‘civilization’ and ‘poor people having rights’; while Tacitus imagined the ‘barbarians’ as being unsullied by such ‘niceties’.

… in part, yes, because they lived in a frozen waste that no one would voluntarily go to, lmao.

Short hair would have been unusual in the time and period, though, unless you were a filthy R*man sympathizer!