I won't be in Chengdu this time (though I'd love to go there another time), I'll instead mostly be in Hunan province (though my plane lands in Xi'an, and I also end this leg of the trip in Kunming; so I'll get many chances to take Chinese trains yay!), but please don't hesitate to recommend places there to me if you know of interesting spots that I might not have heard of.

I said "this leg of the trip" and I now realise that I left out a pretty important part in my original post: I'm not only visiting one Socialist country, I'll be visiting two!!! Indeed, I've heard that tourists shouldn't travel in China during the Spring Festival, and since my semester starts in Taiwan Province after the Spring Festival I figured I'd visit the mainland before it, then go to visit Laos where I've also wanted to go to for a long time, and only then go to Taiwan.

(no Laos emotes )

Orientalism is indeed quite theoretical, especially in the first chapter (out of three) which I'd say is the hardest part to read, since he basically lays out the scope of orientalism (which is actually the title of the chapter). But afterwards he gets into specific examples of events (like Napoleon's invasion of Egypt or the construction of the Suez canal) or authors (Renan, Sacy, Byron, Chateaubriand, Flaubert… but also Marx) to illustrate the development of orientalism in tandem to European colonialism (in anthropology and other social sciences, but also in the portrayal and use of "the Orient" in fictional works), and I felt it was considerably easier to understand, not only because of the many examples but also because I actually understood somewhat well what he meant by orientalism since he spent the hundred or so pages of the previous chapter explaining it. The third and last chapter is also fascinating, since it delves into the contemporary manifestations of orientalism, and especially the last part where he shows how Euro-American cultural influence has even spread these orientalist constructions to "the Orient" itself (through academia and consumerism, at least these are the examples which he talks about), to the point where the people there adopt that same view of themselves as "orientals": a caricature of themselves as a homogeneous "other" to the West.

I've bought my plane ticket to China, I found quite a bargain: around 360 euros for a direct flight, normally this is around the price of flights with layovers (many of which are even above this price). I'll be visiting a bit of the mainland on the way to Taiwan Province where I have my student exchange, I'm so excited! This will be my first time out of Europe, as well as my first time visiting a Socialist country!

I'd say that since Settlers covers a larger timeline (at least when it comes to the US specifically), it is a great companion to Liberalism because it is able to show how volatile the boundaries of the "community of the free" that Losurdo speaks of have been across US history. For example, it shows that the use of certain minorities as slave/underpaid labour in the US has fluctuated much more than I would have previously imagined (as in: which minorities were exploited as labour and which were subject to genocide changed a lot over time; and also as in: I never had imagined that the exploitation of Asian minorities, for example, was this crucial to US settlerism on the West coast), following both European immigration into the US and the development of the country's productive forces. Settlers also crucially shows how ingrained settlerism is in the population itself, which is why socialist and even so-called "Marxist" movements dominated by settlers couldn't actually attain a truly revolutionary class-consciousness because settler ideology always won out against class solidarity between whites and blacks (which is why the latter of whom have only been admitted into labour unions in the 1920's when whites believed they could better control them and keep them as an overexploited subsection of society through their integration into their white unions, for example). And even when both books cover similar ground (for example both cover the actual reasons behind the war of independence, or those behind abolitionism in the northern US states), it's good to have a reminder of these things I've read in Liberalism that have slipped from my mind since then.

I'm only at chapter 7 so far (I'm a slow reader) so there is much more than I'm yet to learn, but I'm now ashamed that I didn't read this book earlier (which is why I compared it to Edward Said's Orientalism, which gave me the same reaction).

I'm finally getting around to reading Settlers by J. Sakai. As a European who doesn't know much about American history (in fact you could say that most of what I knew beforehand was from reading Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter-History last year) I find this book almost as eye-opening as Edward Said's Orientalism was for me when I read it in 2021.

Death to Amerika

They didn't execute enough of them

well I guess I've won my bet (I've bet a box of chocolates with an old teacher from high school on a Trump victory in 2020 and lost, and again this year) which is about the only way in which I was invested in the elections as a non-Burgerperson

There is no alternative

Thankfully I'll leave France, though only for a semester, in a few months. However I'll be in so I'll still see brainworms infestations.

Speaking of going to a Chinese province, Albanian citizens can go to China visa-free for up to 90 days; as a mere Fr*nch citizen, I can only do so for up to 15 days. Maybe becoming Albanian is not so dumb an idea after all...

No, in the case of Albania for example they changed the citizenship law in 2020, and in my case (article 6 of the new law) I just have to establish a "direct lineal kinship up to the third degree" with an Albanian ancestor. This exempts me from the criteria in article 8 (such as residing in Albania for a certain number of years, and knowledge of the Albanian language), except for two of them: not having been convicted of a crime that would result in 3 years of prison in Albania, and not bring a threat to Albanian national security/public order.

TIL I'm eligible for citizenship by descent in two Balkan countries, despite not speaking either of their languages nor having ever lived outside of KKKracKKKer iSSland and the IIIrd Empire , because of how easy these countries have made it for someone who has a ridiculously small amount of blood from their country to become a citizen. If I wanted I could technically become a compatriot of both and

pop cult

你好！我也是汉语学生！我在大学学习政法和国际关系，所以我觉得学汉语真的很重要。我从来没去过中国，但是下个学期我要去学习在台湾省的一个大学！我希望我去那儿的时候可能也去其他中国的省份。

Je n'ai jamais mis du fromage dans mon omelette donc je ne sais pas si j'aime ça. Mais, de toute façon je préfère les œufs brouillés (surtout quand ils sont très cuits !)

GOOD bot

I really liked his Idols of Nations; pretty niche indeed, but also very interesting and it touches a subject I know next to nothing about. I guess I should read his other works since he has many others on similar subjects. Which ones would you most recommend off the top of your head?

At this point I don't know why I am even surprised.

chicanery

I think I remember seeing BadEmpanada jokingly saying that there should be a "we will dance again" festival on 7 October and explaining it for a few minutes. This poster seems too similar to a shitpost related to this, this can't be genuine right?