---

Tacitus basically accuses the Christians of the equivalent of 9/11, burning down Rome mass murder all of this stuff, but no one's heard of it for untill the end of the fourth century.

And so how does that happen? We can't just gloss over this. I'm just going to go through the list of all the places where this doesn't show up.

Pliny the Younger has never heard of it. So this is a huge public event that would be in public memory for generations, right? Like there's no way you just forget about this, right?

And we know from him through the way that he talks about Christians that his unclePliny the Elder who wrote this eyewitness history of this event where never mentions it has no knowledge of it.

Suetonius never mentions this. He only mentions one persecution under Nero and he lists the Christians that were persecuted. He lists it a list of public morals legislation. So he has no knowledge of them being accused of being mass murderers and he mentions the fire, but he doesn't connect them to the fire. He has no knowledge of Christians being connected to the fire. He has no knowledge of Nero persecuting Christians for the fire. It's not in there. And when he does mention Christians being persecuted, he seems to think that it was just for some sort of public morals thing and not for, you know, mass murder destroying Rome.

Then all the Christian writings. The acts of Peter and the acts of Pilate. You know, these are forgeries, they're fictions written in the second century, but they relate basically how Peter and Paul got killed by Nero. So the persecution of Christians to Christians all throughout the second century. We see Tertullian confirms this as well only knows about this that Peter and Paul were killed by Nero for some more sort of weird petty political reasons. No knowledge of the fire, no knowledge of connection to the fire.

The Acts of Peter and the Acts of Paul. There's kind of like sort of political intrigue yada yada. Point being is they're not killed for anything to do with the fire, right? They're not killed for arson. There's no fire. Like it never happened.

There are no masses of Christians. There's just Peter and Paul and maybe a few of their colleagues are killed. So it's the only persecution by Nero that even Tertullian has heard of. And Tertullian read Tacitus. So we know he's a reader of Tacitus. So he'd never heard of this burning of Rome connection either. So how could Tertullian have never heard of it, right?

So when Tacitus talks about the Christians being persecuted by Nero, he's talking about these acts of Peter and the acts of Paul, those legends. And we know that because he explicitly says, "Oh, it's because of the killing of Peter and Paul." He has no knowledge of the fire or anything that uh and the Christians themselves when they're telling narratives, whole narratives about the persecution under Nero.

And then Lucius has never heard of it. And Lactantius has never heard of it. And Lactantius was a renowned Latinist. So he would definitely have known Tacitus.

So you have even like Tacitus is not aware of this. He wrote a whole history of the church that goes through persecutions. He doesn't mention this important event.

Christian apologists will say, "Well, maybe this just happened but it just wasn't popular or whatever." Like they can make up an excuse, but when you have to make up excuses for all these sources I listed, your argument is improbable, right? Like how probable is it that all these sources had never heard of it, right?

Book of Revelation also doesn't know about this. So, so Revelation's narrative, of course, is coded, so you have to like interpret it, but of course, it never says Nero, but you can work it out that he's talking about Nero. And its narrative is that Nero persecuted Christians and then the fire of Rome was God's punishment for persecuting Christians. So even the author of Revelation had no knowledge that Christians were persecuted for the fire. He's thinking of some other persecution which is probably a reference to the legend that we see in the acts of Paul and Peter.

https://youtu.be/jF3EUqLoH6U?si=C-UYT6RUL8ugG7Nw

---

---

What did the sexual revolution of the 1960s ever do for us? The invention of the contraceptive pill reduced women’s fear of unwanted pregnancy, enabling them to provide the kind of sex a lot of men prefer: copious and commitment-free. Many women claim to enjoy this kind of sex too. But, as Perry explains, there’s good reason to disbelieve at least some such reports. For we now live in a culture where, though it isn’t taboo for a man to choke a woman during sex, or anally penetrate her, or ejaculate on her face while filming it, it is taboo for a young woman to express discomfort about the nature of the sexual bargain she’s expected by society to make. This bargain says: sacrifice your own wellbeing for the pleasures of men in order to compete in the heterosexual dating marketplace at all.

What the sexual revolution had for women in the twentieth century have been supersized in the digital age of the twenty-first. There is little doubt that contemporary sexual culture is destructive for younger women in particular. It sells them a sexbot aesthetic, pressures them into promiscuity, bombards them with dick pics and violent pornography, and tells them to enjoy being humiliated and assaulted in bed. It says that, as long as they choose it, being exploited for money is ‘sex work’ and that ‘sex work is work’. It also tells women not to mix up sex with love and to stay disconnected and emotionless from partners.– ignoring the obvious fact that telling women to subdue their minds and submit their bodies to physically stronger strangers can be lethal.

In a culture dominated by male sexuality, there’s an obvious interest in convincing women that they want to have sex like men do, and many women go along with things they later come to regret.

Both liberal feminism’s narrow focus on choice and its incapacity to discuss deep differences between women and men stem from its intellectual forefather: liberalism, a political tradition heavily focused on freedom of choice as the thing definitive of personhood. The fantasy of a liberal subject is of an ostensibly sexless individual, defined mostly by the presence of a free will, untethered by family ties or community expectations and pursuing private preferences in a relatively unfettered way.

once we acknowledge the ‘hard limits imposed by biology’, we can make informed inferences about female wellbeing in particular – rooted in the real, and not what is projected or fantasised by men.

---

---

To summarize, I think that I have thought of a way to measure the collision entropy of different parts of the grammar, and that it is possible to calculate the p-values of certain patterns in the names of places using them. The entropy of the syntax can obviously be measured by measuring the entropy of spell-checker word list such as that of Aspell and subtracting from that an entropy of a long text in the same language (I was measuring only for the consonants, I was ignoring the vowels, because vowels were not important for what I was trying to calculate). I got that, for example, the entropy of the syntax of the Croatian language is log2(14)-log2(13)=0.107 bits per symbol, that the entropy of the syntax of the English language is log2(13)-log2(11)=0.241 bits per symbol, and that the entropy of the syntax of the German language is log2(15)-log2(12)=0.3219 bits per symbol. It was rather surprising to me that the entropy of the syntax of the German language is larger than the entropy of the syntax of the English language, given that German syntax seems simpler (it uses morphology more than the English language does, somewhat simplifying the syntax), but you cannot argue with the hard data. It looks as though the collision entropy of the syntax and the complexity of the syntax of the same language are not strongly correlated. The entropy of the phonotactics of a language can, I guess, be measured by measuring the entropy of consonant pairs (with or without a vowel inside them) in a spell-checker wordlist, then measuring the entropy of single consonants in that same wordlist, and then subtracting the former from the latter multiplied by two. I measured that the entropy of phonotactics of the Croatian language is 2*log2(14)-5.992=1.623 bits per consonant pair. That 5.992 bits per consonant pair has been calculated using some mathematically dubious method involving the Shannon Entropy (as, back then, I didn't know that there is a simple way to calculate the collision entropy as the negative binary logarithm of the sum of the squares of relative frequencies of symbols, I was measuring the collision entropy using the Monte Carlo method). Now, I have taken the entropy of the phonotactics to be the lower bound of the entropy of the phonology, that is the only entropy that matters in ancient toponyms (entropy of the syntax and morphology do not matter then, because the toponym is created in a foreign language). Given that the Croatian language has 26 consonants, the upper bound of the entropy of morphology, which does not matter when dealing with ancient toponyms, can be estimated as log2(26*26)-1.623-2*0.107-5.992=1.572 bits per pair of consonants. So, to estimate the p-value of the pattern that many names of rivers in Croatia begin with the consonants 'k' and 'r' (Karašica, Krka, Korana, Krbavica, Krapina and Kravarščica), I have done some birthday calculations, first setting the simulated entropy of phonology to be 1.623 bits per consonant pair, and the second by setting the simulated entropy of phonology to be 1.623+1.572=3.195 bits per consonant pair. In both of those birthday calculations, I assumed that there are 100 different river names in Croatia. The former birthday calculation gave me the probability of that k-r-pattern occuring by chance to be 1/300 and the latter gave me the probability 1/17. So the p-value of that k-r-pattern is somewhere between 1/300 and 1/17. Mainstream linguistics considers that k-r pattern in Croatian river names to be a coincidence, but nobody before me (as far as I know) has even attempted to calculate how much of a coincidence it would have to be (the p-value). So I concluded that the simplest explanation is that the river names Karašica, Krka, Korana, Krbavica, Krapina and Kravarščica are related and all come from the Indo-European root *kjers meaning horse (in Germanic languages) or to run (in Celtic and Italic languages). I think the Illyrian word for "flow" came from that root, and that the Illyrian word for "flow" was *karr or *kurr, the vowel difference 'a' to 'u' perhaps being dialectical variation (compare the attested Illyrian toponyms Mursa and Marsonia, the names Mursa and Marsonia almost certainly come from the same root, but there is a vowel difference 'a' to 'u' in them). Furthermore, based on the historical phonology of the Croatian language and what's known about the Illyrian language (for example, that there was a suffix -issia, as in Certissia, but not the suffix -ussia), I reconstructed the Illyrian name for Karašica as either *Kurrurrissia or *Kurrirrissia, and the Illyrian name for Krapina as either *Karpona or *Kurrippuppona, with preference to *Karpona. Do those arguments sound compelling to you?

On the Internet forums, I thus far received two somewhat-serious objections:
1. A Reddit user called neuralbeans thinks that my experiment is flawed because it doesn't take into account the possibility that the nouns in the Croatian language have a significantly lower collision entropy than the rest of the words in the Aspell word-list. If so, the upper bound of the p-value could be higher than 1/17. I don't think that's a serious flaw, I think that's a blatant ad-hoc hypothesis. What magic would make the nouns in the Croatian language have a significantly lower collision entropy than the rest of the words in the Aspell word-list? I can see how that can be true in the Swahili language, where due to the noun classes nouns cannot start with some prefixes that verbs can, but I fail to see how that could be true in the Croatian language. Furthermore, why would the collision entropy of nouns be lower, rather than higher? I don't think the burden of proof is on me to do a more complicated experiment due to somebody's ad-hoc hypothesis.
2. A forum.hr user called DarkDivider claims that Proto-Slavic phonotactics didn't allow four syllables with yers to be consecutive. If true, that would make my etymology that Karašica comes from Illyrian *Kurrurrissia (via a Proto-Slavic form *Kъrъrьsьja) invalid, as *Kъrъrьsьja contains four consecutive syllables with yers. But I cannot find any reliable source claiming that or claiming the opposite. It sounds like a weird claim to me because phonotacticses of various languages usually do the opposite (requiring vowel harmony...).

---