Emily Rodríguez

“In addition to being at the losing end of the imperialism of free trade, the Indian and Chinese economies were also throttled by military expenditures and the gold standard. In the Victorian era, no other major countries were forced to devote such excessive portions of their national income to war. India, already saddled with a huge public debt that included reimbursing the stockholders of the East India Company and paying the costs of the 1857 revolt, also had to finance British military supremacy in Asia. In addition to incessant proxy warfare with Russia on the Afghan frontier, ordinary Indians also paid for such far-flung adventures of the Indian Army as the sacking of Beijing (1860), the invasion of Ethiopia (1868), the occupation of Egypt (1882), and the conquest of the Sudan (1896-98). As a result, military expenditures were never less than 25 percent (or 34 percent including police) of India's annual budget, and viceroys were constantly searching for creative ways to purloin monies for the army from other parts of the budget, even from the Famine Fund. Victorian England, on the other hand, never expended more than 3 percent of its net national product on its army and navy, a serendipitous situation that considerably diminished domestic tensions over imperialism.”
― Mike Davis

“When you have Harm OCD, it can often feel like you're repeatedly being accused of a terrible crime. OCD is your accuser, but it also acts like a high-powered defense attorney who says, "Look, I can get you a not-guilty plea, guaranteed. I'm going to get all the witnesses and all the evidence and bring it all up in your trial and if you stick with me, the jury will acquit you. 100%." You hear this and think, Great, let's do this. I know I'm not guilty. Let's make sure it's official. Then the OCD says, "Sure thing. By the way, I cost $1000/hour, I bill 24 hours a day, and the case will take a few years, maybe more. In the end, you'll get your not-guilty verdict, probably, but I should tell you, the long trial will decimate you and the verdict might not make that much of a difference. But never mind that, let's get to that evidence of your innocence."

An OCD therapist like me is no high-powered attorney. I'm more like a public defender and my advice is simple: Plead the fifth. In an American court, when you plead the fifth amendment to the U.S. constitution, you are saying that you will not answer a question that could incriminate you. In other words, no matter what OCD asks, just don't answer. You're probably thinking, "No, that makes me look really guilty." Then I explain, "If you don't take the bait and answer OCD's questions, this thing will go to mistrial in a week. No one will remember it. It might as well have been just a forgettable fluke." This approach is what it means to accept uncertainty, and it is indeed scary. It doesn't come with that shiny promise of complete vindication. But it also doesn't cost you a lifetime of obsessing. Accepting uncertainty about your violent thoughts means allowing the possibility that they could be true by not trying to prove otherwise.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“The decline of export competitiveness brutally pruned the foliage of the Nordeste's class structure. If successive southern-dominated governments assuaged the great northern oligarchs with regular political kickbacks (often in the guise of "drought aid"), more modest fazendeiros were left to the mercy of market forces. From about 1875, control over production began to pass into the hands of the owners (often foreign or foreign-born) of modernized usinas. "The capability of the usinas to handle a greater load of cane called for further monopolistic consolidation of land resources; in the wake of this process, small and middle landowners became uprooted." The fate of ex-slaves, of course, was unimaginably more difficult in an economic system that no longer required the same huge levies of labor-power. As the Nordeste's economy slumped into a coma, supernumerary labor was either pushed into the sertão's "black, barren fields of hunger" (Tavora) or induced to gamble with disease and exploitation in the rubber forests of Amazonas.

What did NOT happen in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was what neoclassical theory would have predicted as an automatic reflex: the emigration of northern labor to southeastern growth poles. Instead, beginning in the late Empire, national and local governments began to heavily subsidize mass immigration from Italy, Germany, and Portugal. Even the elites of the Nordeste fervidly embraced "Europeanization." An extraordinary example was Bahia during the terrible "Two Eights" drought-famine of 1888-89. While state authorities were roadblocking retirantes' route to the cities and forcibly interning them by the thousands in camps, they continued efforts to lure European immigrants with expensive subsidies (few were tempted).

Southeastern coffee planters, for their part, wanted only "white" overseas laborers after Emancipation, and soon made this federal policy in the new Republic (The racial preference was later amended to include Japanese as well as southern Europeans.) "Why were the coffee planters in the southeast more willing to finance immigration from Europe than from the northeast?" Leff believes that "part of the answer may have been the prevalent racial attitudes on the part of the coffee planters, which led them to prefer European to mulatto workers," while Deutsch points to "cultural biases on the part of Southeastern planters against native Brazilian workers."

Both underestimate racism as public policy. Gerald Greenfield has shown how Liberal discourse about drought and development in the late 1870s revolved around urban perceptions of the "dark, primitive world of the hinterland" and "retirante inferiority and aversion to labor." "To the extent that Brazil during the latter portion of the nineteenth century embraced the tenets of positivism, enlightenment notions of progress, and the concoction of scientific racism of thinkers like Buckle and Spencer, the backlanders became not merely curiosities from a bygone age, but detriments to the nation's progress. Evolving institutions of national culture, largely based in Rio and revealing marked influence from Western Europe and the United States, stressed the nation's greatest potential while lamenting the inadequacies, intellectual as well as moral, of much of the nation's population." The Brazilian Republic, moreover, was probably the first government anywhere explicitly committed to large-scale "positive Eugenics." Leading fin de siecle savants like the Bahian scientist Nina Rodrigues corroborated fears that "race mixing was responsible for all social deviance such as banditry, religious heresy, and the like." Whereas mass European immigration into the United States in the 1890s was conceived as simply providing human fuel for the economy, Brazil's elites also wanted to use immigration to radically transform the nation's racial physiognomy. They were obsessed with "de-Africanizing" and "whitening" Brazil.”
― Mike Davis

“Not only can you not predict the future, you can never be certain what your intentions were in the past. We only ever know what our intentions are right now in this exact moment.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts