BF2S Forums DAST Chat

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Are there any positive media representations of Roma in Europe at all? Aside from the shows about child marriages.

uziq wrote:

they are gypsies, completely different, you see. macbeth is only talking about the people you find on the steps of the sacré-cœur.

The Romani are widely known in English by the exonym Gypsies (or Gipsies), which is considered by some Roma people to be pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity.[67] Beginning in 1888, the Gypsy Lore Society[68] started to publish a journal that was meant to dispel rumors about their lifestyle.[69]

uziq wrote:

did you get that from wikipedia too?

uziq wrote:

i do think that a culture or an ideology can affect the progress of or direction a society takes. it is, after all, a question of how a society looks at itself, reflects on its past, and envisions its future. culture and ideology are 'webs' through which we perceive the world and so act on it. it stands to reason that a society with, say, a protestant outlook in the New World will adopt certain attitudes towards the material world, towards fellow human beings, and towards their spiritual beliefs and general 'idea' of the Good/desirable. so that you can get an industrious people who also are susceptible to over-rationalization and a tendency to consider other human beings algebraically, as units rather than beings (to make one academically inadmissible gross generalization ...)

what i profoundly DIS-agree with is that these cultures are 'inherent' or intrinsic, that they are related to our genetic traits so that there is a thing as 'black culture' or 'african intelligence'. it's scientifically illiterate and ignores the entire reality of a culture and its attending ideologies, which is that they change and mutate throughout history, according to external pressures/forces and internal actions/reactions. a people's culture isn't some autonomous unchanging, eternal thing; and it doesn't spring from a rock, autochthonously. culture is constructed, and so subject to change.

there is literally an entire historical discipline dedicated to this, and it's hardly recondite or recherche stuff. here is the introduction to an essay from 1965 with which every history student of the last 60 years will be familiar. 'official' colonial administrations left and western puppet elites as well as giant 'apolitical' corporations moved in to divvy up the economy and run the country by proxy. there are so many books written about this. there's even been multi-part BBC documentaries about it. how has all this passed you by? you are sheerly ignorant, man.

Last edited by uziq (2020-03-10 02:13:11)

One of the most interesting features of South African capitalism is the ambiguous position of large-scale capital vis-à-vis the white nationalist regime and its ideology. In the book under review, massive evidence is presented to support the assumption of a conflict between the interests of large-scale capital, on the one hand, and those of the white workers and small-scale capital (operating mainly in agriculture) who form the power base of the regime, on the other. The former upholds the supremacy of market forces as a principle of resources allocation and income distribution, while the latter favour an administered capitalist economy directed to preserving their privileges relative to the African population and to improving their bargaining position in dealing with large-scale capital. An analogous situation was illustrated in my article on the Political Economy of Rhodesia (in nlr 39). and it is gratifying to find the assumption further corroborated.

The most important single element determining the nature of economic and political development in Southern Rhodesia, was the British South Africa Company’s overestimation at the end of the 19th century of its mineral resources, and the persistence of this overestimation for roughly 15 years. The reasons behind such a misconception can be partly detected in the political interruptions which characterized the early period of colonization (Jameson Raid, Matabele and Mashona rebellions, Boer War). The costs incurred in the meantime increased the stake of the Company in the country and led to additional heavy development investment particularly in railways. The over valuation became apparent when, eventually, the Rhodesian gold fields failed to yield deposits comparable to those of South Africa. For example, even in 1910 against a profit of close to £7 million from the eleven leading Johannesburg gold mines, the ten leading Rhodesian mines yielded a profit of only £614,000. Large-scale workings were uneconomic because the deposits were scattered and the ore itself often of a low quality.

The desire to recover the original heavy outlays induced the Chartered Company to foster the formation of a white rural bourgeoisie which, by developing the country would raise the value of its assets in the area—viz. the railway system, the mine claims, and especially land.