Comment on Makes sense
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 day agoThey weren’t worried about the tax man, but only a fool would believe there were zero authorities that would question someone suddenly coming upon wealth.
It’s not paying taxes but producing plausibility that laundering provides.
Dasus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And what sort of a fool would live under some state’s power while actively practicing piracy?
You’re just gonna get the crew to drop you off after four to see your wife and kids? Take the weekend off, park the sloop harbor?
Pirates didn’t participate in high society. Or any state-sponsored society for that matter. They had their own societies.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_haven
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Piracy
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They still needed to interact with society. Do you think most ports weren’t controlled by some kind of authority that you’d have to get some kind of either favor or believability with?
Pirates weren’t pirates just to pirate things… not the successful ones, anyways.
Dasus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Honestly, it’s now been a few decades and gonna have to say, even if I feel like an old man yelling at the skies, it does feel like people on the internet just used to be smarter and humbler.
I just linked you two articles which detail almost a century of the golden age of piracy, during which private havens, aka complete societies which were either under weak states which tolerated/allowed or even sponsored piracy, or completely self governing communities. Either way, they were complete communities. There are people who lived their entire lived in cities like Port Royal and Tortuga.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Piracy
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_haven
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortuga_(Haiti)
Tortuga is 183 square kilometres. These weren’t tiny outposts in which pirates hid from the authorities. They were prosperous and wild, but complete societies.
To not even glimpse at the basic material when it’s literally shoved in your face, yet still have the gall to argue as if you knew the subject? The internet was better 25-20 years ago without the normies.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
My point was they’d still have some need to launder money. Or do you think it was just a walk in the park to get tons of gold and avoid all the people you’ve just robbed?
Even if laundering money was just as easy for some as going to the right port and melting it down DOES NOT erase the long history of laundering and subterfuge.
A single time period with single instances where pirates were the police does not magically remove the MUCH larger history of civilization.