Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital • Hacker News Board

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#251

Post by mariodiana » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

avn2109 wrote: post #148

duxup wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm imagining numerous editorials "I don't know how to tell you to stop sacrificing children...."

Speaking of editorializing, the article's author took to Twitter [0] to defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise that all cultures and ideologies are equally good and valid. You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civiliza…

People have completely confused the technique of disinterestedness in the service of scientific inquiry with the legitimacy—and necessity—of moral judgment.

When a person puts on his or her "scientist's hat," the thing to do is to set aside moral judgment in order to get a clearer and more complete look at the culture one is investigating. That's because bias is blindness. Preconceived notions cause people to jump to conclusions and miss important details of the culture (or history) they're studying.

The mistake is that far too many people fail to realize that at some point you take the hat off. You stop being a scientist and start being a civilized human being. Radical cultural relativism is monstrous.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#252

Post by emidln » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

XalvinX wrote: post #242

Steko wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some cultures/ideologies really are better than others. If you need me, I'll be right here in my Western Civilization, happily not vivisecting anyone. Good old western civilization, no blood on our hands.

Well, you know, they were either "not human" (or 3/5 in some cases) or "terrorists" or "reds" (those millions in Laos and Cambodia must have fell in that category, one would hope) or something like that. Not sure how they categorized those 200,000 or so peasants in Guatemala, but hey, out of sight, out mind, eh?

In recent US history as well as ancient history, "them" vs "us" has been enough justification to satisfy the public in any time period. It's not that few in the US cared about bombing "commies" in Laos and Cambodia, it's that being "red" made much less difference than being "them". This is tribalism at its finest (or worst, take your pick).

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#253

Post by detritus » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

felipemnoa wrote: post #93

InTheArena wrote: post #65

Threads that are respectful, interesting and insightful like this are why I adore HN. Please don’t ever change. That aside, As a historian, I think our skepticism of primary sources has gone way way way to far. Plutarch is ignored, because Roman. Cortez was ignored because Spanish. Do they have reason to exaggerate? Sure and they at times do. But the archeological evidence on both Carthage and Cortez was really clear…

>>were probably a big reason why Spain so quickly supplanted the Aztecs. Maybe, maybe not. It didn't hurt that the Spaniards had powerful biological weapons on their side that decimated [1] the Aztec population. Same as what happened here in the United States with the native population. Had it been the natives spreading new infectious diseases to the arriving europeans, history would probably have been quite differen…

> Imagine going to a new land and upon contact with the natives a sizable portion of your people always dies off while the natives stay healthy and at full fighting strength.

One could argue that there was at least one example of South America's 'geographic genetics' fighting back against European encroachment and winning - The Darien Scheme, which ultimately broke Scotland, enabling rule by England back home.

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

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#254

Post by Filligree » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

ythn wrote: post #236

stevenwoo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this is off topic, but when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove something to God, that seems to be a mixed message alongside what you are posting.

It's almost as if God was helping Abraham understand what He felt like sacrificing His own son (Jesus) to the world.

Uh, that hadn't happened yet. This was over a thousand years earlier.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#255

Post by lostlogin » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #241

Turing_Machine wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Care to give examples? Sure. Soviet Famine of 1921 (5 million). Soviet Famine of 1932-33 (7-10 million minimum, perhaps many more). Soviet Famine of 1947 (1 million or so). Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 (15-43 million). Cambodian Famine of 1974-79 (2 million). Ethiopian Famine of 1984-85 (400,000). North Korean Famine of 1996 (3.5 million). Number of famines in the capitalist west over the same time period: zero. Note…

> Note that I'm not counting food shortages caused by active or recent warfare in either case, Surely the Ethiopian famine and the Cambodian famine could be disregarded if you applied this rule consistently. And the Bengal famine is arguably something caused by a Western democracy that wasn't directly a result of the wartime conditions.

Attributing starvation in Leningrad and Eastern Germany to Marxism is a little odd too.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#256

Post by bobthechef » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

barking wrote: post #173

avn2109 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your cultural relativism/multiculturalism/whatever-you-want-to-call-it leads you to equate/compare "institutionalized torture killing of children" with "pollution," that's a hint that you've made some drastic reasoning errors. It's such a silly, unreasonable ideology that it basically refutes itself when you get anywhere near a corner case like this. Some cultures/ideologies really are better than others. If you n…

Western Civilization considers it a human right to be able kill the most vulnerable humans under the pretext that they aren't ready yet to have human rights.

As njarboe wrote, only recently, and it is by no means restricted to the West (see China or Soviet Russia). The only reason why it is shocking vis-a-vis the West is because it is a radical break with the ethical principles the West has acknowledged (and yes, often practiced poorly) for almost the last two millennia.

The most demented part of it is that as horrific as the practice was historically, as the article here shows, the reasons, as crazy as they were, were at least centered around existential and cosmic concerns. Today, we sacrifice out of inconvenience, or because we "made a mistake", and someone has to pay, but not the guilt party, of course. But because we are still influenced by those "old principles", most of us cannot even consciously face what we are doing. We dehumanize the victims through piss-poor pseudo-intellectual gymnastics so that it all computes in our psychotic calculus of moral purity.

Now compare the possibly hundreds of thousands the Aztecs sacrifices to the 60+ million sacrificed in the US alone since 1973.

So not only do we sacrifice at a far grander scale than ever before, we deny that we do so because we're too cowardly to look the truth in the face. We're not the Aztecs! We have the decency of performing our sacrifices discreetly, out of sight, by other names, and with a _sophisticated_ detachment. We're civilized, damn it!

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#257

Post by PurpleBoxDragon » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 3:31 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #179

mirimir wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because what "horrific" means depends on your culture. So sure, it's horrific for you and me. But it arguably wasn't horrific for Aztecs back then. Or even for their victims. Analogous in the Western tradition is the belief that honorable soldiers should freely give their lives to protect comrades and country. To me, that's also horrific, but whatever.

That's non-controversial, but it's not the argument that the linked Twitter feed makes. It says that not only that culture didn't see it as horrific, but that we can't morally judge what they did "through our Western colonial lens" by saying that it was horrific. Last time I've seen similar reasoning, it was when a person was attacking the term FGM (female genital mutilation) on the basis that it is "colonialist misj…

>but that we can't morally judge what they did "through our Western colonial lens" by saying that it was horrific.

We can, but it is pointless (the culture is now dead and gone) and it does raise questions about objective and absolute morality, of which many people disagree.

It also can easily lead into very messy discussion about modern day actions which in some sub cultures (and other cultures that may one day exist) would look equally horrendous. For example, we often are fine with abortion because of our standard as to at what point a human counts as a human. How can one objectively say our standard is okay, but someone whose standard is to not start counting til a year old isn't?

Or to bring up another hot button issue, look at MGM and the differences in how it is treated compared to FGM. You can barely even mention these concepts without risking a flame war (that is still a term, isn't it... feels like I never hear anyone use it anymore).

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#258

Post by JoeAltmaier » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 3:39 PM UTC

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #257

int_19h wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's non-controversial, but it's not the argument that the linked Twitter feed makes. It says that not only that culture didn't see it as horrific, but that we can't morally judge what they did "through our Western colonial lens" by saying that it was horrific. Last time I've seen similar reasoning, it was when a person was attacking the term FGM (female genital mutilation) on the basis that it is "colonialist misj…

>but that we can't morally judge what they did "through our Western colonial lens" by saying that it was horrific. We can, but it is pointless (the culture is now dead and gone) and it does raise questions about objective and absolute morality, of which many people disagree. It also can easily lead into very messy discussion about modern day actions which in some sub cultures (and other cultures that may one day exis…

Because all those things are very, very different? Its common to blur things and make 'everything ok' by ignoring how different things really are.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#259

Post by lostlogin » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 3:40 PM UTC

avn2109 wrote: post #166

shoo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in modern western society, we tend to have a regard for the lives of [certain] individuals in the short term, at the expense of lives of others in the longer term, not to mention relatively little regard for the environment, or other species. other societies may have been held together as engines that required the input of thousands of human lives to be sacrificed to appease the gods, our society functionally appears…

If your cultural relativism/multiculturalism/whatever-you-want-to-call-it leads you to equate/compare "institutionalized torture killing of children" with "pollution," that's a hint that you've made some drastic reasoning errors. It's such a silly, unreasonable ideology that it basically refutes itself when you get anywhere near a corner case like this. Some cultures/ideologies really are better than others. If you n…

> If you need me, I'll be right here in my Western Civilization, happily not vivisecting anyone.

How about your government? Those hands are a smidge less than clean.

Re: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

#260

Post by spamizbad » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 3:56 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #200

avn2109 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of editorializing, the article's author took to Twitter [0] to defend her article's reverent/respectful tone and (nowadays-common) unspoken premise that all cultures and ideologies are equally good and valid. You'd think it'd be easy to use ritual vivisection, human sacrifice at scale, organized child murder, and cannibalism [1] as an absolutely unambiguous black-and-white line by which to demarcate civiliza…

This seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far. Of course Aztecs didn't see this practice as evil - but why would we care? We have our own moral system, and I don't see any reason not to use it in this case.

> This seems like an excellent example of postmodernist notion of moral relativism getting too far.

I mean, if we want to be morally objective... what does the war on terror's body count say about the United States relative to the Aztecs? We're 10x as evil?