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Comment by peterfirefly | Hacker News Reader

> Restrict the size of private estates: Caesar proposed to limit the amount of land that could be held by any one individual, in order to prevent the accumulation of vast estates by the wealthy elite.

And would he have given up his Spanish silver mines?

> This would help to ensure that there was enough land available for small farmers and other citizens.

It would also -- totally coincidentally -- ensure that the competing powerful families would not remain strong enough to threaten Caesar but I'm sure that wasn't his intention. Caesar was an honourable man, after all.

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Yet another entrant to the Roman whataboutism parade. Sure. You win. Whatever. Caesar was a ruthless plutocrat that so-everly unjustly denuded those poor, poor Roman Opimates of their fortunes and prestige to prevent them from opposing Rex Caesar by giving land to the poor and veterans, reforming the calendar, spending endless years on military campaigns to expand Rome's wealth, and granting citizenship to non-Italics, then letting everyone who hated him come back if they wouldn't try to kill him. I hear Cato the Younger quite virtuously hated Mondays. Dies Lunae delendae sunt. etc. etc.

I have read apologies for Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh that were practically identical to your Caesar apology. There was no end to all the good stuff those people tirelessly did for their ungrateful nations in spite of all the evil people who tried to stop them.

An association fallacy is an informal inductive fallacy of the hasty-generalization or red-herring type and which asserts, by irrelevant association and often by appeal to emotion, that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another. Two types of association fallacies are sometimes referred to as guilt by association and honor by association.

I think I really did win that one.

Show trials and struggle sessions were absent during Caesar's dictatorship, as were executions and totalitarianism. Even if Caesar's clemency were entirety motivated by power-seeking, Caesar was a Fabian rather than totalitarian executioner. But sure, lull your integrity to sleep with pithy nothings.

Sure, he was Cincinnatus reincarnated.

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