thethirdgracchi

Incredible painting, oozing with style. Thanks for sharing.

So I did this process in 2015. It might be different now, just FYI. I did have to go to the consulate, it's huge and miserable and you wait in line for over an hour. You apply for a tourist visa with a long forum, attaching proof of airline ticket purchase both into and out of China as well as a hotel room, and have to give in your passpt as well. If all goes well, they'll shoot you an email in a few weeks and you have to go back to the consulate to pick up your passport with your new shiny 10 year 90 day multi-entey visa. They do have single use visas but usually even if you apply for that single use visa they just give you a 10 year multi entry visa to encourage more tourism. As long as your fill the forms out right, you'll be fine. It's just quite time consuming.

When you get to China it's pretty much a normal place with a different suite of apps, the only big difference being everything is reliant on Alipay and WeChat. Menus are QR codes only accessible through WeChat. All stores only take mobile payments. You are required to use these apps to function in urban Chinese society. So definitely download them. Getting money into Alipay as a foreigner without a Chinese bank account is not easy, so make sure to read up on how to do it! It also changes all the time so I don't know the current scheme of how to do it. Wonderful place though, incredible food, everybody is very helpful even if they don't speak English, get a jianbing for breakfast and go for dim sum the next.

‘Anois ar theacht an tSamhraidh’: Ireland, colonialism and the unfinished revolution is a wonderful place to start. Gives a good overview of the contradictions and struggles of Irish decolonization, and what remains to be done.

I want to note that Sally Rooney has also refused to allow her most recent works to be translated into Hebrew and sold in Israel in accordance with the BDS movement. She's a real one.

Well given that Portugal was a fascist state up until a left wing military coup in the mid 1970s I don't think you're off base here.

That's a train or bus, there's no way a plane has windows like that.

TikTok without Americans is a dream come true. I hope it gets banned for the sake of the rest of us lol

That's kind of Branko Milanovic's argument in Capitalism, Alone. Good book, even though I disagree about a lot of its conclusions (mainly that China is clearly "state capitalist").

Yeah I love Dune for things like this. For example, the religion of the Fremen is Zensunni, a religion founded by a breakaway sect from Maometh aka the Third Muhammad. Their holy book is the Orange Catholic Bible, which takes from the Bible of our own time but also mixes it with points of wisdom from the Butlerian Jihad.

That's just vibes based. You can browse their writers and editors here, they're actual journalists for the most part: https://mediadirectory.economist.com/

The Economist every year also runs a "Books by our Current Writers" section in their last issue of the year, it's definitely not mostly interns/college kids. Their articles are anonymous so the magazine "speaks with one voice" (the voice of British millionaires!) but the people they employ are all known. Their columnists, they get their own article in every issue, are also not anonymous.

I asked Biden what he would do in a second term to protect abortion access at the federal level. “Pass Roe v. Wade as the law of the land,” he said.

Biden after he wins a second term:

President Barack Obama said on Wednesday he favored abortion rights for women but that passing a law guaranteeing those rights was not his top priority, trying to avoid inflaming divisions over the issue. "I believe that women should have the right to choose," Obama told a news conference marking his first 100 days in office. "But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on."

So for China specifically, 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 I've identified above, 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.