I heard someone talking about how, in Cortez’s diaries, you can see he’s constantly obsessing over how he’s going to repay the debt he went into to make the trip to the Americas.
Which isn’t to absolve him of blame for being a ruthless shithead, but rather to point out that he didn’t simply do things because being a shithead was cool (well, I’m sure he blew off steam in abhorrent ways, but I digress). The point was that there were institutional factors at play as well, and that we can’t simply do a “bad apples” analysis.
This all came up in the context of discussing Scheidler’s The End of the Megamachine. I just found it to be a really interesting discussion of things I wasn’t aware of, and wanted to float it into the internet aether. And to say, yeah, the people they sent certainly had many problems
I heard someone talking about how, in Cortez’s diaries, you can see he’s constantly obsessing over how he’s going to repay the debt he went into to make the trip to the Americas.
Which isn’t to absolve him of blame for being a ruthless shithead, but rather to point out that he didn’t simply do things because being a shithead was cool (well, I’m sure he blew off steam in abhorrent ways, but I digress). The point was that there were institutional factors at play as well, and that we can’t simply do a “bad apples” analysis.
This all came up in the context of discussing Scheidler’s The End of the Megamachine. I just found it to be a really interesting discussion of things I wasn’t aware of, and wanted to float it into the internet aether. And to say, yeah, the people they sent certainly had many problems
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Makes sense. That's probably the closest thing to a rich person they could make sit on a boat for half a year eating salted meat and lime vinegar.
I want to read some