Considering many people willingly became gladiators you're pretty on point, it was not only about money, but it was an easy way to gain access to housing, food and other amenities that gladiators were offered between fights and training, not to mention it could also be an alternative to slavery when one fell into debt they couldn't repay.
Most gladiators were slaves, fyi. Rarely you could make enough money to buy your freedom, but that was hardly unique to being a gladiator. Your other points still stand—it was more attractive than destitute poverty or death.
You really don't know anything about pro wrestling if that's what you think. The moves they perform might not have the intention hurting, but they're both dangerous and painful, there's a lot of skill involved to not end up in a hospital, not to mention some of the less spectacular moves come directly from olympic wrestling and it's variants. It's a performative spectacle, but it doesn't make it any less dangerous or skillful, saying otherwise is just being ignorant.
It's really sad how Hackernews is so chockfull of misinformation, you'd think the average user here would be smarter and less complicit in it, but no, if anything this whole debacle just proves how ignorant the userbase is.
Most people on Lemmy are leftist and left-biased, in fact there're some pretty big and problematic tankie instances, right-wingers are a rarity and they're ostracized. If anything, people moving to Lemmy are sick of all the neoliberal/right-wing bullshit.
Ah, I've been using it for the tech stuff. My mind kind of just blocks that stuff naturally now or tries to. I use it for the technology aspect.
Well, if it's like that, where's the _decent_ websites? I don't use reddit. I block X, Facebook, everything. All that's left is HackerNews. I just want to enjoy higher level discussions.
There are instances on the Fediverse ranging from actual far-left tankies to actual far-right Nazis. Many of them are banned from interacting with the really big general-purpose instances, but they still exist. If you insist on only touching instances that aren't banned from general-purpose instances, that's on you, and that's not demanding the right to speak, that's demanding the right for others to listen to you.
This would be true if there wasn't a huge list of coup attempts in developing countries backed by the U.S. dating back almost a hundred years up until today. It's not a conspiracy, the U.S. has engaged and continues to engage in political interventions world over when they deem it necessary.
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