Melanie’s Frontal Lobe

Melanie’s Frontal Lobe

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The Dawn of Everything
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
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Addendum (12.3): Haunted by Credit: 'Structural Adjustment' as Modern Tribute
Structural adjustment simply means, 'open your market for business' whether you like it or not
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Mel Tan Uy
Chapter 12 (Part 3): Debt Imperialism: Bank Loans as Modern Tribute
The new tributary order demands debt peonage as part of the loan repayment
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Mel Tan Uy
Chapter 12 (Part 2): The U.S. Dollar: Backed by Power, Not Gold
The apogee of hypercapitalism is to represent a single currency like the U.S. dollar as the world's money backed, not by gold, but by a military…
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Mel Tan Uy
Chapter 12 (Part 1): The Magic Money of Capitalism (and the Missing 9/11 Gold)
Money is magical because it appears/disappears out of thin air.
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Mel Tan Uy
Chapter 11 (Part 8): The Apocalypse in Western Casino Capitalism
Whether in France's court capitalism or England's industrial capitalism, capital extraction always portends of imminent destruction to the human way of…
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Mel Tan Uy
Chapter 11 (Part 7): The Gambler in Western Casino Capitalism
The gambler figure in casino capitalism risks his entire life and universe to potentially win big but without playing by the rules
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Mel Tan Uy
Chapter 11 (Part 6): The Paradox of Freedom and Debt in Western Capitalism
The concept of freedom/debt is the two distinctive features of Western capitalism: the market as freedom paid on the backs of indentured service, free…
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Mel Tan Uy
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Chapter 11 (Part 5): The King is in Debt
Credit morphed into joint-stock companies in the West: financing wars and fueling early modern financial crises
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Mel Tan Uy
Chapter 11 (Part 4): The Virtue of Self-Interest
How credit/mutual aid was villainised and self-interest became the moral high ground
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Mel Tan Uy
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Chapter 11 (Part 3): The Christian Roots of Self-Interest and Capitalism
The quantified ideas of self-interest and capital growth in Florentine accounting trace back to St. Augustine's self-love
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Mel Tan Uy
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Chapter 11 (Part 2): Balance Sheets of Brutality: Debt and the Business of Colonial Terror
Western Europe lucked out by discovering the Americas—Graeber argues that debt resulted in untold tragedy and terror that befell over 70 million lives
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Mel Tan Uy
Chapter 11 (Part 1): The Bottomless Metal Sinks of Asia
Did Western Europe radically innovate its capitalist practices because they were economically lagging behind Asia—the economic superpower?
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Mel Tan Uy
Melanie’s Frontal Lobe
Melanie’s Frontal Lobe
I am committed to slowly reading and deep-diving one non-fiction book a year. Mostly in anthropology.
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