thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]

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.

Thank fucking God. At least when it comes to nukes Trump usually has the right take, glad he was able to stop this one from spiraling out of control. Not to anybody’s interests.

Don’t wanna overreact or anything but uh this seems Very Bad. Lahore is like 10 km from the Indian border and is Pakistan’s most populated city. That’s when the nukes start going.

Stay safe comrade, always appreciate seeing your comments around here.

This is uh Not Good huh. Seems like a huge escalation, directly striking military targets. Thus far India’s excuse has been that they were only striking “legitimate” targets ie “terror camps.” You can’t really wave away striking Pakistani airbases as “terror camps.”

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/

Thank you for this analysis, love your posts here. Really interesting to watch the development of Chinese anti-air performing in this conflict.

From the Economist :

Pakistan shot down 12 drones that entered its airspace from India, warning that its neighbour would “pay dearly for this naked aggression”. Earlier Shehbaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, vowed to “avenge each drop of blood” after India launched air strikes on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. India was responding to an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir last month. Pakistan denies involvement.

So thus far the entire conflict has been mostly India failing in breaking Pakistan’s air defenses.

The big jump with Deepseek honestly is the cost. Deepseek isn’t like better than the cutting edge Western models, it’s basically on par. The key is it cost 20 times less to train. Deepseek cost around $5 million, whilst gpt-4 was around $100 million.