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

#271

Post by horseLOGIC » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 7:10 PM UTC

nyolfen wrote: post #261

Malarkey73 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article uses the same "tone" that we regularly use to write about the Romans - who crucified people, ritually strangled prisoners during their triumphs, kept slaves, and made people fight to death for their fun. That said I'm not sure the Gauls or Parthians or Carthaginians were saintly. I don't think the author is implying that the Aztecs were better or the same or worse than Tlaxcala or Cortez conquistador. The…

>You adopt the neutral tone to avoid endless whataboutery. >It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking.

You presumably quote that as if there was a contradiction there, but there isn't.

We have fairly recent cases of children willingly blowing themselves up in Syria. All it really takes is the promise of a glorious afterlife, possibly combined with a life of deprivation in the here and now.

Being sacrificed to the Aztec gods was a great honor, it was probably voluntary in the majority of cases. As a rule of thumb, you don't want to sacrifice the unwilling, it kinda ruins the show.

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

#272

Post by horseLOGIC » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

mariodiana wrote: post #251

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…

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…

I'm not sure I get your point. When I research human sacrifice, I must tacitly condemn it, because that's the civilized thing to do?

Human sacrifice is really just obsolete technology. It just doesn't really work, as the Aztecs had to figure out. It's not like they did it for fun, that would be far more objectionable.

We "civilized" people use different technology, but we still sacrifice people to it - just think of how many people die in traffic.

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

#273

Post by horseLOGIC » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

jacobr wrote: post #192

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…

Regarding Civilization or savagery, which is this: Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calmly asserting that U.S. policy objectives were worth the sacrifice of half a million Iraqi children: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8#

It can easily be "worth it" if by sacrificing half a million children you get to save half a million and one child. Despite what you might want to believe, Mrs. Albright is neither stupid nor evil.

It's also really an unfair question because you don't get to see the result of your policy before enacting it.

Moreover, those deaths probably never happened, at least not in those numbers, and they were used as an argument for war:

https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433

Like the supposed 1 million deaths from the Second Iraq War, those numbers are based on surveys which are highly flawed.

Further, the poor perception of the Second Iraq War supported the lack of action in Syria under the Obama administration. Nobody knows how many lives could've saved (and how many sacrificed) if there had been an early intervention in Syria.

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

#274

Post by sonnyblarney » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 7:50 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #249

sonnyblarney wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Europeans did not remotely come close to killing Central and South Americans at the rate they killed themselves, moreover, the term 'rape' is not a useful pejorative, as there were no real natural resources of value that were removed from that area that would have affected the ability of the aboriginals to live. Gold was removed in vast quantities, but has only a commercial value to those who have ascribed to it…

I meant "rape" as in "rape".

Well ... among the relatively small number of Europeans there around about that time, there probably was rape, which is bad; though you do realize that you're making this point in an article that is literally about the total, systematic and full cultural integration of mass slavery, mass murder, mass infanticide etc. by one group of aboriginals of their immediate aboriginal neighbours, on a scale approaching modern holocaust?

In fact, given > 100 000 skulls in 'one find', and we know this behaviour was common in the region over time, and that certainly not all skulls were preserved ... we're talking easily into the millions of murders, putting this 'on par' with the holocaust. Added the fact this was hundreds of years ago with a smaller population base than modern Europe, in relative terms, this cultural mass murder surpasses the holocaust in relative terms. And done on the basis of 'religion' to boot ...

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

#275

Post by tomohawk » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 7:55 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…

It's estimated that about 1/3 of European population died due to Syphilis brought back from the new world.

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

#276

Post by tomohawk » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

abrowne wrote: post #11

Interesting timing soon after a review of a recent book about Cortés: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/24/mexico-curse-of-c... The review says that "most estimates of the frequency of human sacrifices in Tenochtitlan come from an unfounded assertion by the Franciscan friar Diego Valadés, who was born twenty-two years after the city fell. Valadés claimed that between 15,000 and 20,000 people were sacrificed in…

One wonders what people 400 years from now will think, looking back at the horror of abortion, and whether the numbers are believable or not. There will be around 1 million abortions just this year in the US, or 3000+ a day, more than 2 each minute. Also a non-mechanized process.

It's amazing what people can do when they put their mind to it. It's also amazing what people will rationalize when they put their mind to it.

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

#277

Post by spamizbad » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #268

spamizbad wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It says nothing, because this variable is not enough to make any kind of moral judgement. In fact, I just had almost exactly the same discussion here on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367827 ) merely two days ago and I don't expect to anything deeper than typical cliches anymore.

You're just replacing moral relativism with counterfactual thinking. Just because you can imagine an alternate scenario where things might have been worse, that doesn't provide moral justification for an action. This is especially true since we know what the original justification for the invasion of Iraq and I can't imagine it being aligned with any counterfactual thinking on the subject.

The type of thinking you espouse can be used to justify virtually any military action, including war crimes. All you'd have to say is "it could have been worse..."

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

#278

Post by bodi » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

horseLOGIC wrote: post #271

nyolfen wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You adopt the neutral tone to avoid endless whataboutery. >It's hard for me to imagine that people wanted to be sacrificed, but that's my own biases and cultural conditioning talking.

You presumably quote that as if there was a contradiction there, but there isn't. We have fairly recent cases of children willingly blowing themselves up in Syria. All it really takes is the promise of a glorious afterlife, possibly combined with a life of deprivation in the here and now. Being sacrificed to the Aztec gods was a great honor, it was probably voluntary in the majority of cases. As a rule of thumb, you…

No child (or adult..) on this planet has ever willing blown their self up and that is exactly why we as an “evolved” society have various consent laws.

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

#279

Post by mirimir » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 8:52 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #264

mirimir wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that they're role playing. It's that they're professionally neutral.

I'm talking about people on Twitter who might call the practice 'horrible', they're not role playing Aztecs and they aren't writing a paper. To take issue with their description because they are not either of those things seems silly....or just a sort of academic trolling for attention.

I don't have any problem with them calling it horrific, horrible, or whatever. People are entitled to their opinions, and have the right to state them. Although Twitter also has the right to delete them.

But anyway, what I'm taking issue with is the argument that archaeologists et alia don't have the right to be nonjudgmental. Also that being nonjudgmental isn't the norm for archaeology as a profession.

I don't expect your average Twitter user to know that. But at least, they should understand the concept, if explained well enough. After all, it's also the norm for physicians, attorneys, and psychologists. Even judges, who are supposed to interpret law objectively.

Edit: Oops. Forgot key "don't" and "isn't".

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

#280

Post by tptacek » Sun, Jun 24, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

sonnyblarney wrote: post #274

tptacek wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant "rape" as in "rape".

Well ... among the relatively small number of Europeans there around about that time, there probably was rape, which is bad; though you do realize that you're making this point in an article that is literally about the total, systematic and full cultural integration of mass slavery, mass murder, mass infanticide etc. by one group of aboriginals of their immediate aboriginal neighbours, on a scale approaching modern h…

No, I think you've lost the plot of this subthread. I'm not making a comparative argument about which civilization is better. I'm saying that Cortes didn't rescue Central America so much as perpetrate a genocide on it. We're talking about a movie, for what it's worth.