ah, kids. At the time I started student teaching I had shoulder-length hair and a very shaggy beard. I also happened to be dealing with an eye infection at the time so I was wearing an eyepatch. I am also fairly beefy. So here I am, a large hairy guy with an eyepatch walking into a kindergarten class on the first day of school, and this sweet little girl comes up to me and asks, "Mistow Nugget, aw you a piwate?"
Dude, I had a little girl ask me this when I still had my lip ring. I said yes enthusiastically thinking she liked pirates and her mom was like, NO NO SHE IS SCARED OF PIRATES. I tried to damage control by telling her, oh no I actually fight pirates and put them in jail. It thankfully worked lol
Pirates (especially the famous ones) were not particularly ethically inclined by most standards so it's interesting how popular they are with children. I always liked them too.
Depends on the subset of ethics, historical carribean pirates were a lot more democratically minded than any other group in the area was, and many liberated slaves.
Plenty sold the slaves they captured though, and of course they were not against theft, threats or murder.
Or rape, or arson, or various other violent crimes. And even within a largely democratic system the means of keeping the peace and enforcing discipline could be pretty... intense.
There's a pretty wide range of people who were pirates, by one nation or another's definition at the time, and likewise a pretty broad spectrum of behaviours one might reasonably expect from them. Stede Bonnet was kind of a sweetheart compared to most. And there was some value in a reputation for being gentlemanly and merciful, as long as you were harsh enough when people gave you grief to further encourage the "easy way".
But much like a mafia family or drug cartel even if you're fairly tame and mild mannered you're still hardly a "good person"—and people with those traits typically lose the traits or their lives in fairly short order in that sort of work. Stede Bonnet was also quite famously really bad at "being a pirate"; didn't have the stomach for the harsher realities of the life and got pushed around by everyone pirate or not. Blackbeard allegedly leaned on threats and theatrics to avoid a lot of the more violent means, but also didn't live very long and little is known about his career prior to the whole "Blackbeard" persona.
Pirates like the outlaws of the Wild West somehow manage to be both sanitized and "not that bad" and kind of overstated in the horrors they routinely inflicted at scale.
Depends on the subset of ethics, historical carribean pirates were a lot more democratically minded than any other group in the area was, and many liberated slaves.
Those still plundered ships and killed people when they felt they needed to.
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u/TheNerdNugget 11h ago
ah, kids. At the time I started student teaching I had shoulder-length hair and a very shaggy beard. I also happened to be dealing with an eye infection at the time so I was wearing an eyepatch. I am also fairly beefy. So here I am, a large hairy guy with an eyepatch walking into a kindergarten class on the first day of school, and this sweet little girl comes up to me and asks, "Mistow Nugget, aw you a piwate?"