I can sniff you from afar

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Cake day: November 9th, 2022

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  • Continuing on this

    Western efforts to propagate each ideas produce instead a reaction against “human rights imperialism” and a reaffirmation of indigenous values,

    Justifiably… as said from above

    as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in non-Western cultures.

    I call bullshit… Southeast Asia, East Asia, and South-Asia aren’t really religiously-defined

    Besides, in the Middle East and other Muslim countries, I’d argue religion, if its not an opium of the people, it is the proxy of a new economic mode of organization, or at least a political organization…

    Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.

    The very notion that there could be a “universal civilization” is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another.

    And what does this universal civilization presuppose? A standard of who? China? India? Indonesia (This was written in the context of ‘End of History’, as Francis Fuk-his-ma said, so you can guess whose values to adopt)





  • deathtoreddittoChronicles of SpaceDogsDay 40 Semester 5
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    14 days ago

    For early Europe we went over the Dutch Revolt and how the Netherlands was able to become a big deal in Europe with regard to their wealth. They were really good at trading and invented the food grading system that we see today, I guess that made them trustworthy and people started to really like Dutch products due to that. We learned about Dutch society back in the seventeenth century as well and how it was a bit of an outlier, mostly because of the religious tolerance. But by the eighteenth century the power shifted towards England, but it’s not like they completely declined.

    Funny, I was reading Chapter 36, Volume 3 of Capital when I read this about Holland:

    The Bank of Amsterdam, in 1609, was not epoch-making in the development of the modern credit system any more than that of Hamburg in 1619. It was purely a bank for deposits. The checks issued by the bank were indeed merely receipts for the deposited coined and uncoined precious metal, and circulated only with the endorsement of the acceptors. But in Holland commercial credit and dealing in money developed hand in hand with commerce and manufacture, and interest-bearing capital was subordinated to industrial and commercial capital by the course of development itself. This could already be seen in the low interest rate. Holland, however, was considered in the 17th century the model of economic development, as England is now. The monopoly of old-style usury, based on poverty, collapsed in that country of its own weight.

    During the entire 18th century there is the cry, with Holland referred to as an example, for a compulsory reduction of the rate of interest (and legislation acts accordingly), in order to subordinate interest-bearing capital to commercial and industrial capital, instead of the reverse. The main spokesman for this movement is Sir Josiah Child, the father of ordinary English private banking. He declaims against the monopoly of usurers in much the same way as the wholesale clothing manufacturers, Moses & Son, do when leading the fight against the monopoly of “private tailors.” This same Josiah Child is simultaneously the father of English stock-jobbing. Thus, this autocrat of the East India Company defends its monopoly in the name of free trade. Versus Thomas Manley (Interest of Money Mistaken — Thomas Manley was not the author of this book. It was published anonymously in London in 1668. — Ed.) he says:

    Something about how the creation of a standardized credit system in Holland not only aided commercial, financial, and industrial matters, but destroyed usury, and thus created an example for England

    Usury, in the context of the chapter, can be accelerationist in its ruination of the feudal economy, if not revolutionary, if used by the bourgeoisie to create its own system, but otherwise mostly reactionary, as economic policy, due to its parisitism…