Fun read on the tyranny of “enlightenment”
(twitter.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (31)
sorted by:
Calendars, time keeping, and counting systems have all changed multiple times over the course of human history. The only reason you can make fun of this attempt is because it failed. If this is even true.
We can make fun of it because it failed, yes, but it’s not like that failure happened in a vacuum. There’s not someone flipping a coin on whether a given timekeeping system catches on and this one just got unlucky. It failed because it was a retarded and unnecessary change that did nothing but cause confusion at best and a deliberate attack on societal cohesion pushed through in a much-hated attempt to engineer a top-down changing of values at worst.
That’s why it deserves scorn, not just some arbitrary “well, this one didn’t happen to catch on but plenty of others have” silliness.
I mean there kind of is. It's just the coin flip happened thousands of years ago. That's why there's a random mix of base 10 and base 12. Ever notice that there's two roman vanity months in the middle of the year and now the Sept- Oct- Nov- and Dec- months have prefixes for 7,8,9,10 but are the 9th,10th,11th, and 12th months? Everything is a clusterfuck of random traditions and royal decrees. What's one more?
Everyone has noticed that. December was the 10th month, hence the 'decem'. January and February were the 11th and 12th months, followed by the new year which was in March until the Gregorian reform.
It is not random that there are 12 months. It's 12 because in an average year, there are 12 lunar cycles, which unfortunately do not add up to 365.25 days.