We will never have decent roads here in the rural Ozarks, not in my lifetime or my child's, and telephone service has gone bonkers since landlines were abandoned in favor of snazzy cell phones. We thankfully have REA electricity (glorious socialism!) but proper internet service won't be expanded to every household anytime this century. Electricity came to Rolla Missouri in the 1880s, but it was 80 years later in the 1960s when the last remote homestead was hooked to the grid. I've wringed my hands and wracked my head trying to understand why my family and my neighbors families are less deserving of infrastructure than other people, and it boils down to dollar bills, hills and hollers, and proximity to established population bases along rivers and seas. Flat geography is superior, and virtually all cities are built using water as a transportation method.
Of course there were greedheads... why else would Europeans have gone to the colonies. I'm certainly not saying the clergy were without sin... only that they weren't breeding masses of mestizos in some frantic effort to wipe out the native population. AND... that on the whole, the Catholic were less bent on cultural and physical genocide than the Protestant clergy, reflecting the policies of the states from which they came. That is, it was the English and the Dutch went in more for wiping out the indigenous peoples and replacing them with their own, whereas the French wanted them as business partners, and the Spanish as workers and taxpayers.
It's been around for quite a while now, but Alan Tayor's "American Colonies" (Penguin 2001) is an excellent readable introduction to the issue.
Added thought is that clerics like Las Casas also complained about abuses by his fellow clergymen, which was true whatever denomination was on the ground. An amusing take on all this is Thomas Gage's "The English American" (various reprints since first publicationin 1648). He was a renegade English Catholic, educated at a Spanish seminary, who somehow ended up in what's now Guatemala, fleecing the Mayans before returning to England just as Cromwell and the Puritans took control... so, reinventing himself as a Puritan and rabid anti-Papist, made himself Cromwell's "America expert", and lobbied for English "intervention" in the Americas. Mostly to acquire a source of chocolate... these guys always have an angle. Gage goes on and on, not just on clerical chincanery (or his own chincanery), but on the joys of chocolate, and I suppose we should credit him for introducing to the Brits.
BUT... the interesting thing is, despite his taste for the salacious, Gage doesn't say much about horny priests, though I'm sure there were some... maybe quite a few. Just not enough to account for rapid "mestizaje" of Spanish America.
Of course but truly I wouldn't put anything past our government...because while Joe and the Dems are trying to help people, there are people on the ground everywhere trying to scam people, which might include lead pipes, cheap shit...all of that. Just thinking about that makes me depressed.
As we all live in "Indian Country" - this entire nation was stolen from Native Americans and there was a centuries-long campaign of genocide both physical and cultural - it should be an absolute priority to ensure that the survivors of our attentions have at least the bare necessities of life.
So you mean there's more incentive to work fast in the early rounds? One would think so, to be sure, but that's not how things are going in, say, Alaska right now.
Poma called the combination of the 'mita', forced labor that dragged the men to the silver mines of Potosi or the mercury mines of Huancavalica and the priests being the only young men left in many areas the "double catastrophe" for the population.
Well, you and Daniel have got me there. I've never read any of the Silver Age comics you mention. But if I had, I might have liked them too. Maybe it was the dated and simplistic aspects of the Golden Age that I liked. They were goofy, but they were fun.
Forced labor was unfortunately SOP thoughout "conquored" territories at the time (and to some extent, today). While it ended ... officially... more for practical reasons (it killed off the work force and wass inefficient) it also has to be noted that it was churchmen and Papal bulls that raised "moral" objections.. As did Queen Isabella. Not to say they didn't let the exploiters wash away a lot of guilt with gilt. Or really fuck up with good intentions, like when Bernadino de las Casas suggested replacing forced indigenous labor with African slaves (at least he repented, but too late).
I'm not so much interested in defending the Catholic Church as I am in my never finished study of the "Black Legend"... a sort of ideolgoical war meant to portray Spain (and Catholics) are monsters, while whitewashing English colonialism and their own religous struggles. No different in a lot of ways that the Cold War rhetoric about the evil commies and the upright, moral capitalists. I really didn't mean to highjack this thread, but it was an irresistable temtation to rethink what I never got around to writing about.
Yeah, we're a wee bit side-tracked. The mita originated under the Inca, it was simply the way that people paid their taxes in a non-monetary society by providing labor to the Empire. The Spanish barbarians would round up all the men in an area and take them to Potosi, where silver had been discovered. They would send them into the mine and leave them there for weeks at a time, until they finally figured out that they had to let them back up to fresh air at least once a week or they'd die. They stacked up bodies in played out galleries and collapsed the entrance rather than go to the trouble of bringing them out to bury. Truly one of the more barbaric episodes in history.
Nothing like getting addicted to laxatives. Shit.
Careful. Many countries have adopted the system of proportial reprensentation. In my experience, those are the first ones coming up with results.
We will never have decent roads here in the rural Ozarks, not in my lifetime or my child's, and telephone service has gone bonkers since landlines were abandoned in favor of snazzy cell phones. We thankfully have REA electricity (glorious socialism!) but proper internet service won't be expanded to every household anytime this century. Electricity came to Rolla Missouri in the 1880s, but it was 80 years later in the 1960s when the last remote homestead was hooked to the grid. I've wringed my hands and wracked my head trying to understand why my family and my neighbors families are less deserving of infrastructure than other people, and it boils down to dollar bills, hills and hollers, and proximity to established population bases along rivers and seas. Flat geography is superior, and virtually all cities are built using water as a transportation method.
Of course there were greedheads... why else would Europeans have gone to the colonies. I'm certainly not saying the clergy were without sin... only that they weren't breeding masses of mestizos in some frantic effort to wipe out the native population. AND... that on the whole, the Catholic were less bent on cultural and physical genocide than the Protestant clergy, reflecting the policies of the states from which they came. That is, it was the English and the Dutch went in more for wiping out the indigenous peoples and replacing them with their own, whereas the French wanted them as business partners, and the Spanish as workers and taxpayers.
It's been around for quite a while now, but Alan Tayor's "American Colonies" (Penguin 2001) is an excellent readable introduction to the issue.
Added thought is that clerics like Las Casas also complained about abuses by his fellow clergymen, which was true whatever denomination was on the ground. An amusing take on all this is Thomas Gage's "The English American" (various reprints since first publicationin 1648). He was a renegade English Catholic, educated at a Spanish seminary, who somehow ended up in what's now Guatemala, fleecing the Mayans before returning to England just as Cromwell and the Puritans took control... so, reinventing himself as a Puritan and rabid anti-Papist, made himself Cromwell's "America expert", and lobbied for English "intervention" in the Americas. Mostly to acquire a source of chocolate... these guys always have an angle. Gage goes on and on, not just on clerical chincanery (or his own chincanery), but on the joys of chocolate, and I suppose we should credit him for introducing to the Brits.
BUT... the interesting thing is, despite his taste for the salacious, Gage doesn't say much about horny priests, though I'm sure there were some... maybe quite a few. Just not enough to account for rapid "mestizaje" of Spanish America.
Of course but truly I wouldn't put anything past our government...because while Joe and the Dems are trying to help people, there are people on the ground everywhere trying to scam people, which might include lead pipes, cheap shit...all of that. Just thinking about that makes me depressed.
Exactly! Thank you. I reach for words and explanations sometimes and fall short.
What's the connection between proportional representation and running an efficient vote count?
That you need all the results to determine the outcome
As we all live in "Indian Country" - this entire nation was stolen from Native Americans and there was a centuries-long campaign of genocide both physical and cultural - it should be an absolute priority to ensure that the survivors of our attentions have at least the bare necessities of life.
So you mean there's more incentive to work fast in the early rounds? One would think so, to be sure, but that's not how things are going in, say, Alaska right now.
Poma called the combination of the 'mita', forced labor that dragged the men to the silver mines of Potosi or the mercury mines of Huancavalica and the priests being the only young men left in many areas the "double catastrophe" for the population.
Well, you and Daniel have got me there. I've never read any of the Silver Age comics you mention. But if I had, I might have liked them too. Maybe it was the dated and simplistic aspects of the Golden Age that I liked. They were goofy, but they were fun.
Word up.
Forced labor was unfortunately SOP thoughout "conquored" territories at the time (and to some extent, today). While it ended ... officially... more for practical reasons (it killed off the work force and wass inefficient) it also has to be noted that it was churchmen and Papal bulls that raised "moral" objections.. As did Queen Isabella. Not to say they didn't let the exploiters wash away a lot of guilt with gilt. Or really fuck up with good intentions, like when Bernadino de las Casas suggested replacing forced indigenous labor with African slaves (at least he repented, but too late).
I'm not so much interested in defending the Catholic Church as I am in my never finished study of the "Black Legend"... a sort of ideolgoical war meant to portray Spain (and Catholics) are monsters, while whitewashing English colonialism and their own religous struggles. No different in a lot of ways that the Cold War rhetoric about the evil commies and the upright, moral capitalists. I really didn't mean to highjack this thread, but it was an irresistable temtation to rethink what I never got around to writing about.
Yeah, we're a wee bit side-tracked. The mita originated under the Inca, it was simply the way that people paid their taxes in a non-monetary society by providing labor to the Empire. The Spanish barbarians would round up all the men in an area and take them to Potosi, where silver had been discovered. They would send them into the mine and leave them there for weeks at a time, until they finally figured out that they had to let them back up to fresh air at least once a week or they'd die. They stacked up bodies in played out galleries and collapsed the entrance rather than go to the trouble of bringing them out to bury. Truly one of the more barbaric episodes in history.