I said I wasn't going to be abusive. I'm not afraid of you or any of your friends. I am an adult who's spent way too long in Leftist spaces to be browbeaten by anyone.
On some level I agree. Just like John Davidson's immediate reaction being to say that he's not racist is a response to the trauma that being hospitalized for his disability has caused him. But at some point I have to believe my lying eyes and see that there's about an 80% overlap between people who say that educating them about Tourette's is racist and people who do not believe that Tourette's is real. Due to my identity, nothing I say can possibly get across. So do I wait for black disabled people to try to have that conversation? There's already been one disabled black girl harassed off social media for explaining that coprolalia is real and John Davidson is not a racist for his outburst.
So I'm going to do the only thing I can, which is defend disabled people and not budge an inch. I'm not going to be abusive, but I refuse to back down because the person I'm talking to has a different identity, unless we're going to start applying that to the disabled.
I can understand the first comment being ambiguous enough to cause confusion, but the second makes it explicit. People came in in bad faith, refusing to even entertain the notion that they could possibly be wrong. Why am I obligated to be comradely to people who literally do not believe in medical science about disabilities? Why should I trust my disabled family members' well-being to anyone who ignores medical science when it annoys them?
No one called you a Gusano. I implied that black people are not inherently correct about everything because they are black. This was perfectly demonstrated by people claiming that they understand Tourette's in one comment and then saying that John Davidson is a racist in another because he didn't call white presenters crackers.
Am I obligated to Listen To Jehovah's Witness Voices? They have the same stance on medical science.
The argument I remember* (for england & the Netherlands) was that the soil quality was poor compared to the rest of Europe. The landowners in both states turned to trade, first as a supplement but eventually whole hog.
The first chapter of Origin is dedicated to summarizing the various schools of thought (at the time of publishing) on where Capitalism originated in Europe and why, and one of those that the author rejects is the idea that Capitalism arose primarily from trade.
**Also mildly surprised we didn't read this book, seems just as relevant as Daemonologie /hj
I don't remember who recommended it, and it takes a specific position in a debate, so I'm sure there's some sectarian element that's beyond my understanding.
One other thing about agriculture, is that the american landscapes were intensively managed for thousands of years to produce what humans needed. Europeans were often oblivious to the sophisticated agricultural technology, as it did not resemble the "farming" they were accustomed to. So they didn't recognize the extent of the interventions which had produced to the "garden of eden" they conquered. While things eventually unraveled due to the maintainers being murdered, displaced, or otherwise prevented from keeping things up, the europeans often wandered into environments which "nature" had provisioned with a bounty of goods, there for the picking.
The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View talks about how central the new Capitalist concept of "improvement" was to property rights. In France, still operating under a purely Feudalist mode of production, the job of a land speculator was to find or fabricate claims to land; in proto-Capitalist Britain, a land speculator's job was to calculate how much profit could be wrung out of a parcel of land. Under this new conception, the indigenous Americans had not squeezed every bit of utility out of the soil (depleting it of nutrients, of course) and thus had not "improved" the land and had no claim to it.
I've read The Origins of the Modern World and liked it a lot. The concept of fossil fuels as fixed solar energy that allows one to (temporarily) not be limited by the cycle of solar energy circulation really stuck with me. My allusions to China and India are heavily informed by that book.
Thanks for the overview! I have some of these pieces but it's very helpful to have things laid out. Definitely hadn't thought about how the Crusades formed a shared experience in foreign conquest.
Both the naked extraction of resources and Unequal Exchange were vital to the development of early European Capitalism. But (at least according to the book I've found with the most persuasive hypothesis, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View) Capitalism was born in the English countryside when rents became subject to market prices and assessed land value, creating a systemic incentive to Improve (vital concept in early capitalist concepts of property relations) the land by farmers.
In my (relatively uneducated) view, it seems like Capitalism (compared to Feudalism) would bring massive advantages in productive capacity and ability to sustain large and increasingly urban populations.
Again, not an expert on this history outside of how it intersects with Palestine, but (perhaps paradoxically) I'm sympathetic to this on the surface. Socialists who aren't... you know, the Soviet Union don't have the best track record on chauvinism. Given that, I find it hard to blame a deeply persecuted ethnic minority for not trusting their fellow Socialists.
