That's probably the bulk of it, letting them expire and then using their leftover dollars for BRI. Good point.

There's a shit ton more. Just off the top of my head (I swear these are not made up):

• The Seven Factors of Enlightenment
• Three Jewels and Three Roots
• The Five Precepts
• Three Marks of Existence

"China Drops to No. 3 Holder of Treasuries, Falling Behind UK" per Bloomberg.

This data is only as of March, so it stands to reason China might have sold off more Treasuries in the April and May turmoil we've seen in US bond markets post-"Liberation Day." China is now down to $765 billion in US Treasury holdings (plus a few more billion through Belgian custodial accounts), down from over $1 trillion as of 2020 with no signs of slowing down. Full figures can be seen here: https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/slt_table3.html

Will be very interested to see where things stand post-April though, those figures will be very interesting.

Yeah I agree with take, it's kind of like siding with Satan rather than the Greater Satan. Obviously Europe is the OG home of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, and the various European nations benefit from this global horror we've constructed called the capitalist world system and the EU is a neoliberal project and causes misery across the globe, AND they caused the most destructive war in the history of the species but it's STILL better to have them rearm if they can break free of the Greater Satan, the United States. It's a necessary step in the continuing trend of multi-polarity. It only benefits China and weirdly even Russia, as if the EU can manage to break free of American influence down the road they'll make up with Russia again, as the capitalists there desperately need Russian energy.

This is a huge topic, with a lot of scholarship and debate within the historical academic community. So for China specifically (it's a book about why Song dynasty China, despite having a lot of the preconditions for industrialization, didn't industrialize), probably the best place to start is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. I don't agree with all the conclusions of that monograph but it's a great first foray into the questions and concerns of this kind of longue durée history. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi makes this argument that the Chinese state was strong enough to stop capital from taking over and that the way capitalism formed in the West is actually rather odd; this is a wonderful book but it requires quite a bit of context, and you might even be better off starting with his more broad account of the rise of capitalism called The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, which (despite its name) covers around 500 years from the formation of capitalism in Renaissance Italy up to the modern era. Fernand Braudel's three part Capitalism and Civilisation, from which Arrighi draws a lot of his ideas, is phenomenal but very long and again requires even more familiarity with the historical period.

If you just want a quick summary of all the above, distilled into something quite short but still well done, I'd recommend The Origins of Capitalism and the 'Rise of the West' by Eric Mielants. It's not specifically focused on China, but it does cover the "capitalism requires the state" bit and why capitalism happens in Western Europe and not anywhere else. For some additional counterfactual history of why the West got rich and the East didn't, I recommend ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age by Andre Gunder Frank and Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm (this book in particular is important, since it doesn't cover the larger question of why the West and not China, but it does push back and disprove a lot of Pomeranz's points about coal power).

You can also check out The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood for a specific look at how the capitalism virus spread from England to the rest of the world, but she kind of disagrees with a lot of the historians above. A lot of the argument comes down to how you define capitalism and where it starts. Wood would argue that capitalism doesn't "start" until the agrarian revolution in England, whereas historians like Arrighi and Braudel would place it a bit earlier in the merchant republics of Renaissance Italy and their financialised capital-intensive economies.

EDIT: Missed your last point, basically you need for there to be incentive to do labour saving technological advancement. Steam power already existed in Ancient Greece and Rome, it just wasn't applied to labour saving things because there was no need. If you can accumulate power and capital via slaves and trade, labour is really cheap, and why would you bother?

A really great followup to this is The Capital Order by Clara Mattei. She details the broad response to this in the aftermath of WWI, where fear of the Bolshevik revolution alongside vast nationalization of economies opened up tremendous breathing room for experiments and worker's rights. Mainly, the capitalists cooked up "austerity" in order to crush the power of the workers, and needed fascism in Italy to do this.

I'll add a second recommendation for Kagi. Being able to block sites (like Pinterest) is a game changer too. Their search, though ridiculous at first to bring yourself to pay for what was once free, is more than worth it.

Agent Hitler, FBI is such a legendary screencap too. Some of the best comedy I've ever seen honestly, a legendary series.

Nothing will ever match the hilarity of Danger 5 season 2. The Soviet Union's "America house of horrors" and the entire arc in the Vatican are some of the funniest shit I've ever seen.

Yeah even Japan, a place with a ton of earthquakes and traditional wood construction, at this point mostly uses reenforced concrete for their buildings. And they perform well, as shown by the 2011 earthquake, a magnitude 9.1 quake that was one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. The overwhelming majority of the destruction was caused by the tsunami, not the quake, and these reenforced concrete structures performed well even with an earthquake of that magnitude.

The first five words of the šahāda obviously, لا إله إلا

I mean he's like 95% of the way there; he already did an order deputizing a bunch of law enforcement adjacent folks. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/01/23/trump-deputizes-federal-agents-arrest-immigrants/77914576007/

Protests are more of a ritual than a tactic these days. Protest is a tool, one of the tools in a toolbox to get what you want. They are not an end in themselves. If the protests aren't disrupting anything, if they aren't organized towards obtaining something or making somebody do something, they're not any better than a block party or an online petition.

America is the belly of the beast. No communist organizing in the United States is going to be remotely possible or productive until that beast consumes itself. The balkanization of the United States is basically a prerequisite to any actual revolution there, otherwise you'll just get Bernie-esque folks who are fine with worldwide oppression so long as the treats keep flowing. Any serious reckoning of America's past (and present) of slavery and genocide requires the widespread collapse of the American imperial project and the American imaginary.

The Chilean protest song El pueblo unido jamás será vencido (The people united will never be defeated!) has the exact same sing-along factor and vibe as Bella Ciao, I imagine it's what you're looking for.

No it's subtler than that. Paul is the critique of that stereotype, since he ends his journey broken, alone, blind in the desert having lessened a people and unleashed genocide upon the galaxy. It's pretty explicit that the white savior trope is bad and only ends in evil, destroying both the savior and the once great people he used towards his own sick ends.

The core of the leftist critique will become more and more obvious the longer the series goes on, especially if they decide to move past the first book. In the film we see it when Stilgar meets the Duke. The Duke is the incarnation of capitalism with a smile, the nice liberal. He's not going to hunt down the Fremen like dogs, but under no circumstances is he going to stop spice extraction. He still views Arrakis as his fiefdom, his by right of the Emperor and he feels free to do what he will. The Fremen just want to be left alone and for the imperial extraction of resources to stop. House Atreides is not willing to do this, and in the grand scheme of things makes them just as bad as House Harkonnen. In fact, there's a case to be made that the Atreides are actually worse because they appear nice, but this case will become stronger when you watch part 2.

Likewise, the violence of the Fremen is show to be materialist in nature. They are a hard people, sharpened like a knife by their environment and external circumstances. Their revolutionary violence against their oppressors is shown as just, and it is obvious that if they are to overthrow the yoke of imperial rule they must resort to incredible violence. Nobody debates this fact, nobody is squeamish. This is simply the rules of the game. To defeat colonial oppression violence must be used. That is a very leftist take.

There's also the larger theme of Paul seeing a horrible, violent future and trying everything in his power to stop it but deep down knowing he can't. This is a very historical materialist point—that even Great Men cannot stop what history has baked in, that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." Paul's Jihad (which the movie is too cowardly to name but shows you in that vision of the Fremen on Caladan) is unstoppable, the doom at the end of the tunnel, much as things like climate change or nuclear war are for us. Try as we might, we know the end of our world is coming, and all we can do is watch.