91–100 of 212 posts
Or in 2020: "China created the virus and must be held responsible!" Except that viruses jump from other animals to humans all the time. It can happen in any country.
How strange that most recent pandemics mainly come from the same place. Surely that's only pure coincidence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those articles are more interesting than OP's article. When I research a lot of wealthy families I frequently find their level of comfort not possible to replicate because it is something considered impropriety today. Taking advantage of an imbalance in the socioeconomic order that was promptly fixed as soon as anybody noticed.
> not possible to replicate because it is something considered impropriety today At first glance, but then we're forced to recall the entire Epstein shenanigans. And that's only bits of insight in to that level of indulgent debauchery.
There's a stereotype that witch hunts were “mass hysteria” (as Wikipedia calls them) affecting stupid backwards people (another common stereotype) or stupid believers (a stereotype with a militant atheism flavour). In these cases, we would see more witch hunts the earlier the age is or the stronger the church is. People weren't much more stupid than people today are. Moreover, it's a fairly recent era, I'd even say t…
The main difference between now and then is the way information spreads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kinda fits in quite nicely with Federici's theory, seeing as capitalism emerged in Protestant north-west Europe.
It’s seems a rather peculiar definition of capitalism, if it emerged so late.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you give an example of that level of comfort? Servants were more common back then, but not sure what else.
For example, the family that was able to exploit the socioeconomic order to pick up those land plots from people indicted for witchcraft probably still owns those land plots, but new people will not be able to use the same tactic to obtain land now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn’t a refutation of Federici’s argument. Her’s is specifically that the conditions of European feudalism created an emergent communalism that was then subjugated through witch trials and their mythology in service to the new, Capitalist ordering. She doesn’t argue that gendered forms of subjugation have no prior context in history. And whether or not the changes in women’s social/economic conditions were “temp…
The witch hunt as a means of enforcing female subservience in the context of an emergent capitalism is a just-so story that is driven more by a desire to demonize capitalism than anything else. Gender roles have remained pretty static throughout European history so it doesn't make sense to pin down witch paranoia on a changing of gender roles or attitudes that never changed in the first place. The better explanation…
I've generally heard the inverse statement. Compare the women in Chaucer to the women in Shakespeare, and you'll immediately notice a huge difference in behaviour.
Usually, people say that women's rights took a precipitous dive in the 1600s, with the invention of things like brutal punishments for 'nagging', and so on. Which would fit with the idea it was related to primitive accumulation.
I don't really agree with the grandparent thesis, but I think the chronology is correct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
maybe not witchcraft accusations per se, but im quite unsure how you can be aware of events occuring in the world right now and think that exploiting the current socioeconomic order to gain land and wealth is not done.
Right it wouldn’t be a witch craft accusation , in the west Its one example
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The war on drugs certainly did not have noble goals. It’s a matter of public record that the government used the drug war to target “free love” political radicals, and far worse happened than that.
What public record? AFAIK, the association between war on drugs and targeting radicals and black is mostly based on hearsay.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it be nice if history were actually this simple? The idea here is that Romans, with their pater familias, or the Confucian Chinese, for whom the father was a mini-emperor, were just preparing the way for capitalism, 2000+ years before the fact? Marriage and home-bound women were not an invention of the late medival world. Women may well have been more free in the preceding period, but that was the exception,…
This isn’t a refutation of Federici’s argument. Her’s is specifically that the conditions of European feudalism created an emergent communalism that was then subjugated through witch trials and their mythology in service to the new, Capitalist ordering. She doesn’t argue that gendered forms of subjugation have no prior context in history. And whether or not the changes in women’s social/economic conditions were “temp…
But for reasons others give here I think this is a rather weak analysis to explain the rise of the modern patriarchal family form. And in reality in working class homes women continued to work outside the home anyways, in factories and the like.
The ideological foundation for patriarchy runs much deeper, pre-capitalist, pre-feudal, and goes back to pre-Roman times, but in the context of later Europe it was accentuated by the early Christian church, which was positively _obsessed_ with issues like abortion, pre-marital sex, and women with any kind of power.