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Duke of Qin

@qin_duke

23 Jan

Necessity is the mother of all invention, or a brief history of currency in China. A common point of knowledge is China's early experiments with paper fiat currency but few actually know as to why. The most immediate answer was the lack of gold and especially silver coinage as a

medium of exchange. Gold and silver ingots were used as stores of value, but up until the Columbian exchange, copper cash was dominant for transactions. Copper while useful became increasingly cumbersome as values increased. As to why this was so, the answer is even simpler.

China just doesn't have any significant silver deposits. Even during the Han Dynasty, Chinese silver production was a tiny fraction of Roman counterparts. Some have argued this was because of superior Roman mining techniques but this isn't actually true because even during the

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Duke of Qin

@qin_duke

15 Jan

FYI Michael Kovrig and Spavor are almost certainly actually spies. Their arrest was certainly political retaliation, but that doesn't mean they were innocent. Generally once spooks are outed, they aren't immediately arrested but rather observed to try and identify contacts or

or even try to flip them as double agents. The biggest tell that they were spies is actually Canadian behavior. The Canadian press is non stop reporting on them and their "suffering" while the Canadian government is actually doing jack shit publicly to get a hem out. This kind of

contradictory behavior is emblematic of them having friends in the intelligence community constantly pushing them into the media limelight. Governments really don't actually give a shit if you are arrested in foreign countries for bullshit reasons. Certainly media would be bored

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Duke of Qin

@qin_duke

14 Jan

https://twitter.com/resplinodell/status/1349784769245171712

The fundamental truism is that there is no situation where US political involvement doesn't end up making things worse. A good analogy is like calling the cops and ending up with them showing up and shooting someone's pet dog. The generous excuse is that this is just plain old

https://twitter.com/resplinodell/status/1349784769245171712

beltway incompetence but the more cynical take is the the US, rather than being a net providet of security transitioned to a net producer of chaos. This is due to a principal agent mismatch where the people driving instability are the prime beneficiaries of it. The more unstable

the world is, the more relevant the DC security blob is, the more prominent American imperial managerialism is. DC does not want peace, it wants conflict so as to rationalize tightening it's grasp over it's vassals and more political interference everywhere. This is the reality

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Duke of Qin

@qin_duke

13 Jan

The fact that every crazy foreign agitation organization the US has been funding and finger puppeting for the past half century to subvert foreign governments managed to collectively converge on Washington is absolutely hilarious. Iranian Monarchists, Cuban and Venezuelan gusanos

Korean Moonies, Chinese FLG, RVN loyalists, and whatever minor group of crazies collecting sinecures from Arlington that no one has ever heard of all managed to represent themselves on January 6. Turns out that lieing down with dogs results in fleas. The prime lesson that no one

one in Washington will draw from this is that foreign imperialism always has a debilitating effect on domestic politics and it's people. What had been an high functioning ethnically homogeneous society mostly content to mind it's own business has through the temptation of power

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Duke of Qin

@qin_duke

13 Jan

US domestic policy influences US foreign policy in ways that are very subtle. It isn't all just US jew pandering completely driving Middle East policy but rather frames of reference of what is achievable via American policy fiat. They big brains actually feel that if they issue a

"white paper" or create a list of power point actionables that it will result in tangible let alone desired results. Domestic issues like the so-called war on poverty, or raising minority home ownership, or deplatforming undesirables, all have their methodology replicated across

across the foreign policy realm because they share a foundational belief in American bureaucratic omnipotence to shape reality rather than accepting that there are realities simply out of their control. This generates pressure build ups and externalities that generally manifests

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Duke of Qin

@qin_duke

12 Jan

Not everyone the Communist Party jails is a citizen journalist, brave dissident, or whistle blower telling the truth. The reality of party power means that few people with brain cells are willing to openly confront the party. What this means is that the average person the Party

throws into prison for political crimes is generally some kind of crank, dumbass, or generally a high functioning sociopath with a martyr complex. Few know this. The party lower tolerance of liberal dissent has also driven Liberalism more and more into the margins. The people the

Party arrests now are functionally the equivalent of Youtube shitheads always wearing a beanie to hide premature male pattern baldness while they rant about mole children. The lists of dissidents arrested in 2020 is a who's who of complete wankers that Western media has sanitized

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