fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6341 ]

[ SECRET POST #6341 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6341 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Happy Saint Sheol]

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What are yours?

I don't particularly like it, but I do believe that in order to get modern technology that you need an industrial revolution. And in order to get an industrial revolution, you need at least two Empires full of all their associated colonial practices. You need motivation, competition, and a huge source of cheap materials and free labor in order to jumpstart it all. Like I say, I hate it but its true.

Uhm. So. I sort of agree, sort of disagree.

First, general point - one major problem with trying to think about the industrial revolution and on the onset of modernity is that it's very much a sample size of 1 situation. It's extremely hard to think through which features of it were necessary which were contingent because there just is not the evidence available to us. We can't run a thousand simulations seeing how it would play out in different scenarios. So it's just generally fucking hard to think about.

Second - I do think that colonial trade was a very crucial factor in setting off the industrial revolution. But there are a lot of different ways for colonialism to impact the industrial revolution, and some things where it seems obvious that it was important were actually not super crucial IMO. So for instance, cheap materials and free labor - it's hard for me to see that this was a major sine qua non for the industrial revolution to take place, because of course the whole point of the early industrial revolution was to increase labor productivity significantly through technological development and investment. So, the point is not to increase productivity by increasing the number of man-hours worked; the point is to get more product out of the same man-hours. So free labor is not necessarily a huge part of that equation.

It seems to me that the main impact of colonialism was the profitability of global and colonial trade, and my view is that the main effect of this is that it had a demand-pull effect on industrialization: in other words, the high profitability of global trade led to significant increases in real wages in trade cities, hence led to massive increases in consumer demand, hence provided an economic incentive for industrial development. Now, obviously, the profitability of the colonial trade did depend to an extent on the exploitative nature of the colonization of the Americas. And certainly, especially later in the 18th century, the Atlantic trade was very profitable. And earlier, exploitation of precious metals was absolutely a huge aspect of the whole situation, and the Spanish engaged in pretty horrifying labor practices there. So you absolutely couldn't say that colonial exploitation played no role.

But I would also question how necessary those practices actually were for colonial trade. Like, I think it's possible to imagine colonial practices and colonial trade that were highly profitable for European traders without being so exploitative. A ton of the advantage of European traders during the period was essentially being arbitrageurs between America and Asia: America had unexploited stores of precious metals, Asia had a huge dearth of precious metals but produced a lot of highly valuable trade goods. So given the extraordinarily advantageous position European traders were able to place themselves in as middlemen between those two regions, I think their trading would have been extraordinarily profitable no matter what.

And then the other thing is that it's not really clear how capital-intensive the industrial revolution actually was, especially in its early stages. Like, a lot of the early investments in industrial productivity were carried out on an entrepreneurial basis by relatively small firms. And they weren't really reliant on banks for financing or loans. So while colonial trade and exploitation definitely played a role, it's not necessarily clear how crucial that role was.

in order to get modern technology that you need an industrial revolution

Yes, definitely.

in order to get an industrial revolution, you need at least two Empires full of all their associated colonial practices.

Disagree on the colonial part. That's is how it happened but I don't think it's the only way to get motivation, competition and cheap/free labour at all. What you need is a way to get people off farms and into factories, and with an agrarian economy that's hard to do because you need so many people farming in order to support industrial cities (and more for foresting, mining, and other production of materials). But there's no particular reason why you have to have colonies in order to produce food and other materials - it's just convenient (and was fortunate for Europeans that our diseases killed off so many people in the Americas in particular, leaving their well-tended lands to be exploited). It doesn't seem too hard to imagine trade empires rather than colonial ones.

I don't like bait threads.

Dude, give it a rest.

I don't know who you think I am, but I don't normally post about this or anything.

Proved it's controversial and in theme with the thread at least. /shrug

I think Harrison Butker should spend this season playing for the Raiders after his homophobic remarks.

He should get the shit kicked out of him.

Not in football, in real life. He should get his ass whupped.

OP

I worry that if that happened he'd be able to play the martyr card. Pretty sure that would blow up in all our faces.

Self care is searching his name on Reddit and reading the comments on the multiples posts on /nfl

I will say it annoys the ever loving fuck out of me to keep hearing Taylor Swift get credited for “Familiarity breeds contempt.” That he quoted her as saying that from one of her songs and everyone else running with it like she wrote that is just proof to me that he sucks but so do her fans and all the media who adore her.

Nothing infuriates me more than when writers put their fics into a private "ongoing challenge". Just fucking delete it or orphan it.

I don't think I've run into that. I didn't know people do that to avoid finishing their fics. How do you know that's what it is, anon?

Hmm

It was a completed fic that I had bookmarked for a couple years.

Axolotls are ugly.

You dare?!

People who demand secrets of a certain type to be banned should be forced to make at least 5 different secrets to make up for it each week.

It DOES suck that the male protag in the Japan based Assassin's Creed is not Japanese. Male Asian characters are severely underrepresented in wester games and it reeks of racism (and kinda cultural appropriation) to choose this random black dude over a Japanese man as a protag. And no, the female kunoichi doesn't count as the Japanese representation because Asian women are not even remotely as underrepresented as Asian men on account of the massive fetishising going on.
They could have made Yasuke an important NPC, as they usually do with historical/inspired by historical people. But no, they chose to erase Japanese characters in a Japan based game.

I always take issue with these sorts of takes because IMO (as a non-Japanese Asian American) it feeds more into white supremacy and anti-blackness than it does into anti-Asian propaganda.

I disagree. And I also think that this argument is exactly why Ubisoft did this, because by choosing a black character over a Japanese one, they ensured that nobody can rightfully criticise this choice/this game in general without getting the white supremacist/anti black accusations thrown at them AND they got free outrage publicity.
There was no reason other than that to choose a non-Japanese character.

Yep. "They made this character in an Asian setting black because they think Asians aren't POC enough" is a strawman, and almost always means you just don't want a black character. I assume most other characters in this game set in Japan are Japanese; there are black people in Japan (source: I live here), you should be able to deal with one black character.

It's irrelevant that there are black people in Japan. The whole thing about AC games was that the main characters are people from the country the game takes place in. Only the second they go for an Asian setting, they throw this overboard and choose a non-native character, it fucking sucks and it's definitely weird.

Spaghetti is the worst noodle.

I don't think Kabru Dungeon Meshi is a trans man, and I think some of the evidence people use for why he is subtextually trans actively erases or sidelines his textual struggles (discrimination due to an inborn physical trait, the complications of his interracial adoption by an elf, etc.) or ignores the canon setting in favor of trying to project modern trans issues onto him (he is a tall-man being raised by elves. Even if he was AFAB he'd probably be considered masculine compared to elf men. He sure as hell wouldn't be seen as weak by the (possibly matriarchal??) elves for being perceived as a girl.

Being fat is not something to be proud of.

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[ SECRET POST #6341 ]

Controversial opinion.s

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