There's a famous Churchill quote about democracy that is almost always misquoted:
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
To me, the key words that are often left out entirely are: that have been tried.
For the Aztecs in this picture, it may actually be true that their system was the best one they'd tried so far. Maybe ritual sacrifice of a tiny minority was a small price to pay compared to what they'd experienced until then. Representative democracy with voting rights for all citizens over the age of majority might be the best system we've tried so far. Kings willing to devolve some power to their barons in the Magna Carta was the best system for England so far.
We shouldn't stop trying to make things better. Otherwise we're like these Aztecs.
Representative democracy with voting rights for all citizens over the age of majority might be the best system we've tried
Where? Closest thing I see is a "Rule of representatives elected by representatives elected by less than half the citizens over the age of majority" thing.
Would be mostly fixed with a sane referendum system as inhibitor for politicians going wild.
> tries new system
> 90% of your population dies right away from smallpox
The rest, enslaved
You say "artist not found". Did you try looking?
I did, but apparently I don't know how to use Google Image Search. There's a big "Find original source" button at the top that I had overlooked until now lol
Ok, I believe you.
For what it's worth, I find tineye to be better and you can sort the results by oldest first. This generally gives a clue to the source.
FYI: You can edit the post (title and/or body) to add the link and credit the artist.
bruh, wth? there’s a find original source now in google?
also who can blame you? i thought 95% of lenny users were allergic to google, (unless of course it involved their cellphone)
Tim Krieder is an underrated genius.
I mean, giving artists credit would be a decent system right? Else that would be shady exploitation.
Yeah, how did you find it? I used Google Image Search.
Lets be real, people enjoy the show.
Gladiator fights would be popular even today, especially if to the death was part of it.
Public executions for crimes in Europe eventually turned into entertainment for the masses.
Public lynching was popular in the USA. Don’t get me started on fairs and carnivals.
No "eventually" about it. It was spectacle and entertainment from the start.
Yeah if its bloody its fun.
"ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!"
-Your owners robbing you blind
Gladiators rarely fought to the death... among themselves. They were glad to make a show of publicly executing some untrained prisoners, though.
I’m pretty anti-capitalist. Not 100%, but man shit is fucked right now and it’s gotta be reigned in.
A mixed economic system where the necessities of life are not run for profit (maybe even free?) combined with profit-driven progress for the luxuries would be best. With strong unions for all workers of course.
Oh, and fix the democracy too. No more FPTP bullshit.
I'm pretty capitalist and still a big fan of things like the German welfare state. It's not a perfect system by any means but being poor in Europe sucks slightly less than being poor in north America
Considering the awful things the Aztec empire was doing it was probably a natural choice to ally with Cortes to overthrow it. But even if things are bad they can get worse:
In The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov offers a compendium of some of the most chilling reports, mostly from Spanish priests and friars who, even when committed in principle to the belief that the extermination of the Indians was the judgment of God, could not disguise their horror at scenes of Spanish soldiers testing the blades of their weapons by eviscerating random passers-by, and tearing babies off their mother’s backs to be eaten by dogs. Such acts might perhaps be written off as what one would expect when a collection of heavily armed men—many of violent criminal background—are given absolute impunity; but the reports from the mines imply something far more systematic. When Fray Toribio de Motolinia wrote of the ten plagues that he believed God had visited on the inhabitants of Mexico, he listed smallpox, war, famine, labor exactions, taxes (which caused many to sell their children to moneylenders, others to be tortured to death in cruel prisons), and the thousands who died in the building of the capital city. Above all, he insisted, were the uncountable numbers who died in the mines:
"The eighth plague was the slaves whom the Spaniards made in order to put them to work in the mines. At first those who were already slaves of the Aztecs were taken; then those who had given evidence of insubordination; finally all those who could be caught. During the first years after the conquest, the slave traffic flourished, and slaves often changed master. They produced so many marks on their faces, in addition to the royal brand, that they had their faces covered with letters, for they bore the marks of all who had bought and sold them. The ninth plague was the service in the mines, to which the heavily laden Indians traveled sixty leagues or more to carry provisions … When their food gave out they died, either at the mines or on the road, for they had no money to buy food and there was no one to give it to them. Some reached home in such a state that they died soon after. The bodies of those Indians and of the slaves who died in the mines produced such a stench that it caused a pestilence, especially at the mines of Oaxaca. For half a league around these mines and along a great part of the road one could scarcely avoid walking over dead bodies or bones, and the flocks of birds and crows that came to fatten themselves upon the corpses were so numerous that they darkened the sun.”14
Damn that's a great source to throw at someone saying the Conquistadors were the lesser evil
What in the absolute fuck. Why are we so fucking horrible
We aren't, not most of us. The conquistadors were bottom of the barrel scum who risked all they had in order to get rich as quickly as possible with the only oversight of some clerics who told them the savages had no soul and could be treated like cattle... and the ones who told them otherwise, were sent away. By the time word got back to the mainland, decades had passed already.
That's my friend's opinion on living in third world dictatorships. Very sad and wrong imo but I didn't argue with him fearing he reports me
Not trying to pick a fight, but I wanted to talk this out a bit because it's something that I feel split about. Take Egypt, for example. Authoritarian government, whose main reason for being authoritarian is to suppress a largely rural Islamist movement from gaining power and creating a theocratic state, but, being authoritarian, they also suppress any critics, but also suppress LGBTQ+ folks to avoid handing red meat to the Islamist movement. Arguably the relatively liberal city dwellers would be far worse off under an islamic theocracy than under a secular authoritarian government. I don't see what other choices Egypt has. And it's damn uncomfortable.
How is it better? You missed to address the adminstrative, financial, and judicial corruption, on top of violent oppression and extrajudicial killings, torture and violation of human rights that happens under dictatorships. Ask egyption liberal city dewellers if things were better under Morse, the Islamic brotherhood president who was elected or now under the corrupt military dictatorship of Sisi. They were still able to protest and hold ministers accountable, and even crticize the president himself. Not to mention their freedom of expression, human rights, judicials, elections, ecomony all were miles better. Now their economy, judicial system, elections, freedom of speech, human rights are all gone.
A different and easier example for you is if you consider Saddam in Iraq and Asad in Syria, they used to kill and poison gas reigons that protest against them, but things were good for selfish liberal city dewellers who don't care about anything but their existance. Same if you ask a Han CPP supporter in Bejin about their government treatment of the Ughyers, he'll tell you life is good. In my opinion, all dictatorships are rotten and it's worth to distrupt the good life and unequality which city dewellers enjoyed due to corruption.
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"Sure, it sucks for that guy, but I just keep persevering... One day I'll be the one eating someone's heart!"
Ah yes, temporarily embarrassed ritual sacrificers
Reminds me of the scene in the Netflix show Norseman, where one character says to another, "you have to understand, ritual human sacrifice is not an exact science."
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I know it's a comic, but this likely wouldn't be a sentiment held by people at the time. Would recommend The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow for more.
this likely wouldn’t be a sentiment held by people at the time
Certainly not by the person having their heart cut out with a stone.
Remember that time the Mexica asked a king for his daughter to become the wife of the Mexica leader and invited him to the ceremony only to be surprised that the king didn't enjoy watching a priest dance around wearing his daughter's skin?
I love the early 2000s design of that website
You just read a story about women who was flayed and her skin worn by a priest, and your reaction was to criticize the website design?
Tell me, have the lambs stopped screaming?
It wasn't the only system they had!!
The Aztec were a very brutal nation, not entirely unlike Sparta. ~20 years prior to Spanish contact the Aztec led the "Triple Alliance" of 3 major mesoamerican powers and conquered the surrounding countries to make an empire. The majority of the people in the empire did not like Aztec rule. The Spanish made an alliance with the original nations from the Triple Alliance, built a multinational coalition, and waged a war against the Aztec.
The Aztec and Spanish allies alike both suffered from the smallpox plague. The Spanish alliance emerged victorious and the Spanish, as the most powerful of the bunch on the winning side, took control of the newly formed state.
Moctezuma and Hernan Cortes were friends, they were good friends, when Moctezuma was betrayed and deposed, knowing he was going to be killed he asked Cortes to take care of his kids, and he did, he fought hard in Spain so that they could have titles.
Moctezuma was a Mexica, he was the King of one of the most brutal aztec tribes. History isn't black and white and not easy.
I recognize that artstyle anywhere, that's definitely Tim Kreider of The Pain. Goddamned brilliant political comic artist who switched to long-form magazine articles and stopped making his beautiful and hilarious comics about a decade ago. I'm still sad that we went through the whole Trump era without his cartoons.
Is he also the supply-side Jesus artist.?
I don't know, Nathan Explosion. I just don't know.
Doodly ding dong tick tock
"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good..."
Hey they remembered the chacmool! Shouldn't that be in front of the momoztli?
It's what it's.
Kobe.
Topical
pretty much the modern prison system & meat industry
I was thinking about this the other day. People will say "There were anti-slavery people back when the Constitution was signed, so folks knew it was wrong!" And I'm like "Those people were probably viewed the same way vegans are now."
... I could roast the shit out of this comparison.
Big talk for someone who went two hours without roasting a thing.
8 hours now
Go ahead
We're waiting
I look at this cartoon and I see so=called centrists.
I look at people trying to turn "centrist" into a pejorative and see George Bush announcing that, "You're with us, or you're with the terrorists." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qdvm6h8WKg
