Capitalism is a very specific system whereby a capitalist class is able to take the reigns of state power and direct that towards capital formation/development. Just because the conditions for capitalism to develop were in place doesn't mean it would ever happen; China had the "conditions for capitalism" for like a thousand years but it never developed because the imperial houses kept control of the state and did not allow any would be capitalists to direct state policy. The "board of directors" for CHOAM, the massive merchant guild, are just the Padishah Emperor and the Landsraad (the nobles). There is no separate capitalist class, no merchants that are not in control of the nobles directly. No reason to think that capitalism would develop in the Dune universe when it hasn't for literally 10,000 years since the establishment of the empire based around spice production. Dune takes place around 10,193 A.G., which is After Guild aka 10k years after the establishment of the Spacing Guild which requires spice melange to navigate the void of space, so this economic system has been in place for ten thousand years without capitalism developing. Don't see why it would just randomly appear one day given the structure of the world.
I mean the obvious answer to this nerd is that the world of Dune is distinctly not capitalist. The empire is a feudal institution, planets are personal fiefdoms, and all those in positions of power are not concerned with capital or money so much as they are prestige and power. The spice trade on Arrakis is more similar to something like the Chinese imperial salt monopoly (a state backed monopoly where most of the rents were used to fund the imperial coffers) than resource extraction under capitalism, albeit a Chinese salt monopoly that involved the Chinese colonising a distant land and using it for the sole purpose of salt extraction. The state in Dune is not concerned with capital formation or expansion, the nobles are not concerned, and while there are certainly merchants and traders (as there are in most polities) they are tangential to how the system operates and are not the ones who determine state policy. A "real universe" does not imply that capitalism exists in all places at all times, this guy is just too enmeshed in capitalist realism to understand that the kind of stuff he's saying only makes sense in a capitalist context.
Yunnan has some of the best tea in the world, you're in for a good time comrade.
It'll be like Kissenger's death but better because it'll have real consequences. I'll be cracking out the whiskey I have allocated for the deaths of ghouls.
So I'm going to call bs on this one because we already had a recession in late 2022/2023 (which is when GDP growth is negative for two consecutive quarters) but the Fed said it wasn't because uh idk they said the vibes weren't recession vibes. Two recessions in back to back years is highly unlikely.
But then how did the original show, on a children's television network with ads for kids, have all the things this "adult" show is removing for being "problematic"? I guess everything has atrophied to a ridiculous degree.
English as well, yeah.
This book was fascinating, because it felt like a book that was 60% done. It's a serious mess, but the bones are there. The bones are so good. I can see why that translated to a phenomenal game in Disco Elysium. The idea of the past eating up our world, that we really just live in a museum, that there's nothing left to Do, that all history has been Decided, that's delicious.
Watched the first episode, was not good. Too miserable, with nothing really going on. Feels a lot like the show thinks it's very important but is unfortunately nothing of the sort. Nicole Kidman's Cantonese was so bad that my partner (fluent Cantonese speaker) had no idea what she was saying. I think this is kind of the point, but the show feels extremely disconnected from Hong Kong proper, basically could have been set anywhere.
Fair enough, I'll definitely agree that it's better than open warfare between India and China. Thankfully feels like we're lightyears away from that outcome, especially given BRICS.
Unfortunately this is not wholesome at all; those Indian soldiers are getting the Chinese soldiers to say "Jai Shri Ram," which is effectively a Hindu nationalist slogan. It's the kind of slogan that Hindu nationalists chant directly before engaging in pogroms against Muslims and Christians. They're doing this today of all days because this week Hindu nationalists are celebrating the opening of a temple to Rama at his supposed birthplace that was a sacred mosque (the Babri Masjid) burned down during the 1992 Hindu nationalists riots that killed hundreds of Muslims.
EDIT: In fact it was exactly this slogan that the Hindu mob shouted right before burning down the mosque, so a very obvious fascist dogwhistle here.
I want to contest the idea that a feudal system always develops into capitalism. The development of capitalism is in many ways a fluke, as there were feudal systems in pre-Qin dynasty China (fengjian), the Maṇḍala system in roughly 5th to 15th century Southeast Asia, Feudal Japan, and various parts of India up until European colonisation that all never developed into capitalism.