CrimsonSage

When will left libs learn that it doesn't matter what they say or do the right. Will never care or respect them. No matter how much they roll over and piddle on themselves the center and the right will always see "progressives," or whatever term they are using this decade, as children to be ignored.

I had covid really bad two weeks ago, the whole house did actually. And my housemates girlfriend had covid a week ago. I wonder if it was this variant.

Gotta come clean, I hate energy drinks. Does this mean I gotta turn in my trans badge and trans gun?

I would consider ol Christo Colombo to be an early capitalist. His project in the Americas was explicitly one of resource and labor extraction for export to the metropole, I mean he literally started the slave trade and it doesn't get more capitalists than literally buying and selling labor. Like you didnt have 'capitalism' but you did have emerging capitalists who already had a bourgeois view of the world. In fact I would say that it was the project of European conquest's in the Americas that allowed these capitalists to come to dominate society as it was largely the source of their initial capital stock that allowed the for the consolidation of the capitalist social system in Europe. You can have 'capitalists' in a non capitalist society, they are just contained and limited by the structures of the society that they live in, just as we are socialists stuck in a capitalist society.

The most current understanding of the crusades is the context of the pilgrimage. This differs from the capitalist concept of colonialism and settler colonialism in that the crusades were not a expansion for the sake of acquisition of either sources of labor or resources for a metropole. Yes people made money and some people conquered land, but this was in a very different economic context and much more limited than that of commodity relations. The classical European view that most people still cling to of the nobles of Europe exporting their surplus sons in an attempt to conquer land to increase economic spheres of influence just doesn't hold to modern data analysis. Additionally the crusades' weren't distinct projects that started and stopped but a continuous process that waxed and waned over centuries. Yes there were heightened periods of crusading in which powerful European figures led large expeditions around which historians have periodized "the crusades," eg the First Crusade etc... But this periodization doesn't reflect the lived reality pf people but rather a modern academic framework placed on the history to understand it. Their main "goal" was the control and maintenance of the holy sites in Palestine which had been closed to Christian pilgrims after the defeat of the Romans at Manzikert at the hands of the Seljuks, and the subsequent conquest of the levant by the self same seljuks who began massacring Christian pilgrims; something that they quickly realized was a bad idea because pilgrims are good money.

One of the striking things about the crusades, as alluded to above, was the fact that the main figures who ended up crusading were wealthy and important people who, to use a bourgeois framing, made no profit on the venture and most importantly seemed not concerned with it either, in fact the returnless expenditure on crusade could be said to have been the point, as it was a service to Christendom for the sake of ones soul. The overwhelming majority of people who "took up the cross" as it was termed, because again crusading is a modern historiological concept that was never used by medieval people, were just pilgrims who traveled to the holy sites and then left. In fact, for those nobles that did take up rulership in Outremer their inability to retain western Christian men at arms, as while there was a constant influx that ebbed and flowed over the centuries corresponding with the crusading fervor in Europe the overwhelming supermajority of these Europeans LEFT to return to Europe, was a serious problem that was probably a driving factor in the accommodation and assimilation with the Muslim neighbors, many of whom, after centuries, they ended up identifying with more than the srange pilgrims from the west. And this is another important thing to emphasize is that it was a bilateral relationship in which people and ideas, and yes conflict, went both ways.

Long story short it was a complex and interesting sociological phenomenon that bears only passing resemblance to anything like capitalist colonialism let alone settler colonialism.

Not really no, trying to view them through the lens if settler colonialism is an anachronistic perspective. The closest you could get is from the perspective of the italian trading states which had a driving commercial interest, but even this doesn't really hold.

The crusades functioned under different economic imperatives that don't really conform to the capitalist structures.

So fucking stupid, I really hate how people try and equate the crusades to colonialism. Like they really really really weren't the same thing, basically the only thing they had in common was that it was vaguely Europeans versus Middle Easterners, but even then it was much more complicated.