I cannot help but think that in the coming decades, Americans are going to be looked at like the Germans were after WWII. No one really cares if we abuse people inside our borders, or the occasional foreigner (if they are brown enough anyways), but with our (I sure don't feel a sense of ownership, and I think it was Trump and Bibi who thought it was a good idea, but the world isn't going to care) attack on Iran, and the resulting closure of the strait, and the loss of 30% of nitrogen fertilizer (and all the other effects), this is going to cause famine, revolution, and depression across the globe. Combined with the USAID cuts, it's going to kill 10s of millions before things are back to normal.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and the strait will reopen tomorrow, and we will all work together to minimize suffering that would be a consequence. But I suspect Trump needs to leave office at a minimum for this to end.

I do wonder why the super wealthy haven't leaned on them enough, they have the most to loose, but I don't think they really understand that.

That’s all. I’m just happy now..

Get this man a cape.

Other than twitter/x , is there a way to perhaps maybe possibly get his attention? I don't have any social media other than this and Facebook (just for nostalgia, really). HH, Addendum, and CS have inspired me to write down some observations and do some research and I'd like to roll the dice on getting him to look at it. Unlikely, but you never know.

Edit: Twitter seems like the consensus. I don't want to fall down a rabbit hole, but it might be worth the trip. Thanks!

Hey, I love Dan and the shows, genuinely. I’ve happily bought individual episodes and series before on iTunes, and I would’ve been perfectly happy to buy them through Spotify or other apps that support purchases now. I want to support the show and the crew because they’ve absolutely earned it. But the new account and purchase system feels really backwards. Having the default option be a $100 full access purchase when trying to link through your app of choice is honestly kind of absurd. Then, if you want to buy an individual episode instead, you can’t just listen to it normally through the apps people already use, you get an MP3 download instead. On mobile especially, that’s incredibly inconvenient because now you need a separate app and a whole different workflow from the way people have listened for years. And this is a show people often listen to on the road, while traveling, driving, commuting, etc. Convenience matters a lot there. Even the payment system adds friction. There’s no straightforward “just buy it here” option, instead you have to go through Amazon Pay, PayPal, or another external service. I completely understand wanting to maximize revenue, and I know Dan and the crew are still a relatively small operation trying to make this sustainable. I respect that, and again, I genuinely want to support them financially. But the reality is that if someone really wanted to avoid paying, they could probably find uploads elsewhere online for free. I don’t want to do that, but a more frustrating system is going to push more people toward that outcome rather than away from it. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have their own platform or system where they earn more directly. I just think making it the only practical way to access the content is going to lose them money and goodwill in the long run rather than gain it. I’m sharing this because I want them to succeed, and I think they should hear honest feedback from people who genuinely care about the show and want to support it. And removing ways to support the show does just that.

Is one of my favorite Dan quotes of all time. Any others that live rent free in your head?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmUH6C9QhcU

ADDRESS TO THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD

Delivered by General Secretary Xi Jinping, Chairman of the Central Military Commission of the People's Republic of China, following the Signing of the Pacific Armistice Accords

Beijing, Great Hall of the People — September 3rd, 2033

Friends.

People of the world.

I do not say "ladies and gentlemen," as a man who wishes to speak to presidents and prime ministers only. I speak today to the farmers of the Philippines. To the students of South Korea. To the workers of Latin America who have long labored beneath a weight they were told was freedom. I speak to the peoples of Africa, of Southeast Asia, of the Pacific islands and the nations of the Middle East, who for so long have watched the ships of another country sail through their waters and been told they had no right to ask why.

I speak to all of you. Because what has happened in these past four years was not China's story alone. It belongs to all of us.

Let me first speak plainly about what has occurred, because history must be recorded honestly, even when honesty is uncomfortable for those who have long controlled how history is written.

Marx taught us that history moves according to material forces — that beneath the language of ideals and values, it is power and production and class interest that determine what empires do. We need no other lens to understand what happened in Cuba.

In the year 2026, the government of the United States, under the leadership of President Trump, dispatched its military forces to the sovereign nation of Cuba — a small island, a proud people — and occupied it. They called this liberation. They called this democracy. The Cuban people, who had never elected the American president, who had never invited the American soldier, were told that their independence was a problem to be corrected. This is the logic of empire. This has always been the logic of empire: that the powerful are entitled to decide what is good for those they have chosen to dominate. Lenin identified this logic more than a century ago. He called it by its correct name: imperialism. The highest stage of capitalism. The stage at which capital, having exhausted its domestic frontier, must expand outward or die — must find new markets, new resources, new populations to organize in its service. What happened in Havana was not a policy choice. It was a structural inevitability. An empire does not choose to dominate. It dominates because domination is what empires are for.

We watched this. The world watched this.

And then, when the People's Republic of China, fulfilling its historical obligation and acting within the clear framework of its sovereignty and its solemn declarations across eight decades of patient diplomacy, moved to complete the reunification of the Chinese nation — moved to bring Taiwan home to the embrace of the motherland — the United States did not pause to reflect on what it had just done in Havana. It did not ask itself whether it possessed the moral authority to intervene in the internal affairs of another civilization. It sent its carriers. It sent its submarines. It sent the full assembled power of what it called the rules-based international order.

What it meant was: our rules. Our order.

We did not seek this war. I must say this again, because there are those who will distort it: China did not seek this war. We sought only what every nation seeks — the right to exist on our own terms, to develop according to our own path, to hold together what belongs to us, and to not be encircled, contained, and strangled by the military infrastructure of a power that sits ten thousand kilometers from our shores.

But when war was brought to us, the Chinese people — one billion four hundred million souls, united in purpose — did not flinch.

I will not recount every battle. The names of the engagements that took place in the South China Sea, in the waters east of Taiwan, in the long terrible months of attrition that followed — these will fill the history books for generations. What I will say is this:

America came with its carriers. We answered with our shipyards.

America came with the finest navy the world had built in the twentieth century. We answered with the production capacity of the twenty-first. They sank our ships, and we built more. They destroyed our facilities, and we rebuilt them faster than they could strike again. The American war machine, for all its extraordinary power, was built for a world of scarcity — a world where only America could afford to fight at scale. They discovered, at great cost, that this world is gone.

And this was not an accident of fortune. This was the fruit of the Party's work across generations. It was the Communist Party of China that lifted this nation from poverty and humiliation and built the industrial foundation upon which our defense rested. It was the Party that, following the path opened by Comrade Mao and developed through the reforms of Comrade Deng, made the decision decade after decade to invest in the productive capacity of the Chinese people rather than in the financial instruments of speculation that hollowed out the economies of our adversaries. The shipyards that outproduced the American navy were not built in four years. They were built in forty. They were built by the deliberate, disciplined, long-range planning that only a party with a century of revolutionary commitment to the people's welfare could sustain.

I do not celebrate the loss of life. On both sides, young men and women died in cold water, far from home, for the decisions of governments. This is the tragedy that war always is. I pray for the sailors of the United States Navy as I pray for the sailors of the People's Liberation Army Navy. They were soldiers. They obeyed. The responsibility lies elsewhere.

But I will say what the outcome means, and I will say it clearly:

The era in which a single nation could use military supremacy to impose its will upon the Pacific is over. The era in which any nation's coast could be patrolled by foreign warships under the banner of freedom — while the people of that coast were never consulted — that era is over. The era in which the friends and partners of the United States were not permitted to be the friends and partners of China, were not permitted to trade freely, to develop freely, to choose freely — that era is over.

The armistice has been signed.

American forces have withdrawn from the Republic of Korea. The people of Korea — north and south — will now determine the future of the Korean peninsula themselves, without an occupying army on their soil that was never there for their protection but always, ultimately, for America's strategic advantage. American strike forces have departed the Philippines, a nation that was colonized by the United States for fifty years, lectured about democracy by the United States for fifty more, and is now, at last, free to chart its own course in a region to which it belongs. The American military presence in Japan has been reduced to a defensive force— Japan remains protected, as it should be; we bear no hostility toward the Japanese people — but the bases that threatened China, that pointed missiles at our cities, that transformed a civilian-led democracy into a forward operating base for American power, those have been diminished.

These are not Chinese victories. These are the victories of the people who live in those places.

I want to speak now to a question that I know is being asked in many capitals, and in many homes, tonight.

Is China the new hegemon? Has one empire simply replaced another?

This question is natural. History has taught the world to be suspicious. When one great power falls, another has often risen in its place with the same appetite dressed in different clothing. I understand why people ask. I do not begrudge the asking.

But I want you to consider something.

China has not stationed troops in Cuba to protect its "interests." China has not surrounded the United States with a ring of military bases. China has not organized its neighbors into an alliance designed to contain Washington. China has not sailed its warships into the Gulf of Mexico and called it freedom of navigation. China has not imposed a financial system on other nations, and then threatened to exclude those who disobey from that system, and then called the threat a defense of rules.

China has not done these things — not because China lacks the capability, but because China does not believe the world should work this way. The Communist Party of China has never sought empire. Our ideology does not permit it. Marxism-Leninism teaches that the liberation of one people cannot be built upon the oppression of another — that proletarian internationalism means solidarity across borders, not domination across them. We believe in the right of every people to determine its own path to development — socialist, mixed, traditional — according to its own history, its own culture, its own stage of progress. This is not a diplomatic convenience. It is a principle embedded in our Party's DNA, forged in the years when China itself was the target of foreign intervention and had to fight for its own right to exist.

We believe — and I say this as a matter of philosophy rooted in both five thousand years of Chinese civilization and in the scientific understanding of history that Marxism provides — that the world is not a pyramid with one nation at its apex. The world is a garden. A garden requires many flowers. Different shapes, different colors, different seasons. The gardener's duty is not to make all flowers identical. The gardener's duty is to ensure that all flowers have light, water, and space to become what they are.

This is what China offers. Not dominion. Not a new order built in our image. We offer multipolarity. We offer the simple, radical proposition that African nations may develop their own economies rather than be told what form of development is acceptable. That Asian nations may build infrastructure, trade in the currencies of their choosing, practice governance suited to their histories and cultures, without being graded by Washington and either rewarded or punished on that basis.

We offer nothing more than what every nation deserves: to be taken seriously as a civilization, and left in peace.

I think often of something that was said to me, many years ago, by an elder member of our Party who had lived through the Century of Humiliation — through the wars with Britain, Japan, through the unequal treaties and the carved-up territories, through all the years when China was a map that other nations drew lines across. He said to me: "Xiao Xi, the greatest cruelty is not the wound itself. The greatest cruelty is when the one who inflicted the wound tells you that you deserved it. That your suffering was for your own good. That the chains were freedom."

I have thought about those words many times since.

The nations of Latin America were told that American intervention in their governments was stability. The nations of Southeast Asia were told that American bases were protection. The nations of Africa were told that conditions attached to loans and aid were development. The nations of the Middle East were told that the wars fought on their soil were liberation.

Always liberation. Always for their benefit. And always with the understanding that if they disagreed, there would be consequences.

This is not freedom. This is a more sophisticated word for the same ancient thing. Engels wrote that the state is not a neutral instrument — it is always an instrument of a class, serving class interests, projecting class power. The American state, for all its procedural democracy at home, has functioned abroad as an instrument of capital: opening markets by force, removing governments that restricted American investment, maintaining military dominance not to protect the free world but to protect the free movement of American capital through it. The peoples of the world — you who are watching today, you who have lived this — you have always known the difference, even when you were not allowed to say so.

Today, I say so on your behalf. And I invite you to say it for yourselves.

The road ahead will not be simple. I will not pretend otherwise.

The United States of America remains a great country, with a great people, and vast capability. It is wounded. It is frustrated. It is, for the first time in the lifetimes of most of its citizens, in genuine strategic retreat. This is a dangerous moment. A wounded power can lash out. History teaches us this. We must be wise, and patient, and we must continue to extend the hand of peaceful engagement to the American people, even as we firmly decline to accept the American government's claim to rule the world.

Nor is China without its faults. We are a country of enormous complexity, and we have much work still to do within our own borders — in our economy, in the well-being of our people, in the creative and scientific flourishing that I believe this century holds for our civilization. The Party does not claim to have achieved socialism's final form. We are, as we have always said, in the primary stage of socialism — a long road, requiring constant correction, constant learning, constant renewal of our commitment to serve the people. We do not lecture others from a position of perfection. We speak from a position of experience — the experience of a people who know what it is to be on the receiving end of foreign judgment, and who have decided, finally and irrevocably, that this will not happen again.

I ask only this of the nations of the world: judge us by our behavior, as we will judge ourselves, and as we hope all nations will ultimately be judged. Not by our words alone — words are easy. By what we build, and who benefits from the building. By whether the agreements we make are honored. By whether the nations that work with us find themselves stronger for it, or find themselves dependent in a new form.

We welcome that scrutiny. We invite it. Because we believe that over time, the record will speak.

To the people of Taiwan — and I say people, because it is people we are speaking to, not a political abstraction — I say this: the road to reunification will be a road of patience and of dialogue. The wounds of these years are real, and I do not diminish them. But you are Chinese. Your grandparents knew they were Chinese. The civilization we share is older than any political disagreement, and it will outlast this one. We seek not your surrender but your return to a family that has waited a long time. The door is open.

To the people of Korea — north and south — the arc of your peninsula's history was bent by the interventions of outside powers. That arc can now, perhaps for the first time in a century, be shaped by Koreans themselves. China will support any outcome that the Korean people freely choose and that contributes to peace in our shared region. We are your neighbors. We will be your neighbors long after any other country's interest in you has served its purpose.

To the people of the Philippines, of Vietnam, of all the nations of Southeast Asia who have sometimes viewed China's rise with concern — your concern is legitimate, and I do not dismiss it. We are a large country. Large countries require discipline, and restraint, and consistent proof of good intentions. We understand this. We commit to the principle that the South China Sea is not China's alone — it is a shared waterway, and its governance should reflect that. The discussions we have long proposed are still open.

To the nations of Africa and Latin America, the Global South, the developing world — the institutions that have managed the global economy since 1945 were not built for you. They were built for the benefit of those who built them. The alternative architecture that China has helped construct — the development banks, the Belt and Road, the bilateral agreements made between equals — is imperfect. Every human institution is imperfect. But it was built on a different premise: that your growth is not a threat to be managed, but a contribution to be welcomed. The Communist Party of China sees in your development not competition, but the fulfillment of what proletarian internationalism has always promised: that the liberation of the working peoples of the world is a shared project, and that no nation's progress diminishes another's. We remain committed to that premise.

In the Chinese philosophical tradition, there is a concept that does not translate perfectly into English, but which I will try to render: tianxia — "all under heaven." It is an old idea, and like all old ideas it has been used well and used badly across the centuries. But its deepest meaning is this: that the world is not divided into the important and the unimportant, the civilized and the uncivilized, the nations that matter and the nations that exist as instruments of the nations that matter.

All are under heaven. All matter. All deserve the basic dignity of self-determination.

The Communist Party of China has carried this conviction since its founding in 1921. In those early years, when our comrades met in Shanghai in secret, hunted by reactionary forces and foreign powers alike, they dared to believe that China could be free — and more than that, that a free China would contribute to a freer world. Comrade Mao declared in 1949 that the Chinese people had stood up. What he meant was not merely that China had recovered its dignity. He meant that one of the great oppressed nations of the earth had shown that liberation was possible — that the tide of history ran not toward empire but away from it.

We have spent the eighty-four years since proving him right. And today, on this day, the proof is complete in a new and historic way.

This is what we fought for in these four terrible years. Not to rule. Not to replace one hierarchy with another. But to break the hierarchy itself. To demonstrate by force of will and force of production and force of unity what the peoples of the world have long felt in their bones: that the current order is not permanent, that it is not natural, that it was constructed by power and can be changed by power, and that a different world is possible.

That world is not here yet. It will require years of work, of negotiation, of institution-building, of trust earned slowly between peoples who have often been set against one another for the convenience of their supposed protectors.

But the proof of concept exists now.

The proof of concept is today.

Let me close with this.

When I was a young man, sent to the countryside during the years of hardship, I lived in a cave dwelling in Shaanxi province. I learned then something that no book can teach — not even the works of Marx and Lenin, which I also read by lamplight in those years, and which gave me the framework to understand what I was living through. What the countryside taught me was this: the Chinese people, when they have purpose, when they have unity, when they believe in what they are building — they are capable of anything. I have seen this capacity across all of China's history. I have seen it in these four years, in the sacrifice of our soldiers, our engineers, our workers in the shipyards who worked through the night, every night, for years, because they understood what was at stake.

What was at stake was not China's glory.

What was at stake was the right of this civilization — and all civilizations — to exist on their own terms.

The Party understood this. The people understood this. And together, guided by the accumulated wisdom of a century of revolutionary struggle, by the theoretical framework of socialism with Chinese characteristics, by the spirit of those early comrades who dared to believe that history could be changed — together, we did not flinch.

We have defended that right.

Now we offer to share it.

The world does not need an empire. The world has had empires, and we have all paid the price. The world needs something harder to build and easier to destroy: a genuine community of nations, each sovereign, each developing, each connected to the others through the honest exchange of goods, ideas, knowledge, and goodwill. A community of shared future for all mankind. This is not a slogan. It is the destination that the science of history points toward, if we have the courage to walk in that direction.

This is what China is working to build. This is what the sacrifices of these years were in service of.

We did not win a war. We ended an era.

And now, together, we begin something new.

Xie xie. Thank you. May peace guide all nations under heaven.

— General Secretary Xi Jinping, Beijing, September 3rd, 2033

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Iran… You go there, you shoot at people simply because you have the power to do so, and then you return home to your wife and children never thinking about it again?

What would Captain America and Superman think about Vietnam War ?

New to the hardcore history series, only discovered it a few months ago. I’ve already binged through most of the classic series/episodes, and I’m caught up on Mania for Subjugation.

Does Dan tend to surprise drop new episodes, or will there be any indication that they are coming?

Does anyone else wish Dan would do a series on the ACW? It’s such a long, epic story that I think he could really do it justice.