A very interesting and insightful take from a foreign journalist on the outside looking in.
There are many American reporters, Wang said, who report competently on China. But when I asked how the US media was doing covering the US, he burst into laughter. “If I were the New York Times, I would be putting curse words on the front page every day,” he told me. “F-word, F-word, F-word.”
Lol boomers clutch pearls about superior nationalities like both the US and China aren’t suppressing their youth unemployment numbers and diving face first into a population collapse.
Population collapse is a ridiculous problem. Why does a population need to grow endlessly? Are human beings a cancer?
It doesn’t have to work that way, but we have set it up where if there is a population collapse, then it ends up badly for regular people.
So people who want to mitigate suffering feel like it’s a problem.
I would argue that they are the equivalent of third generation wealth. Second generation saw how hard their parents worked and understood the effort it took to get there.
Third gen were well off their whole lives and took it for granted. Rebelled against previous generations values and thought they knew better.
Rebelled against previous generations values and thought they knew better.
Tbf previous generations loved lynching, slavery, and women not having rights
The boomers did not like those and are the ones who fought that stuff. Everyone hates on the boomers now but they fought for a lot of stuff.
No they didn’t. They’re the Reagan Era cucks. Not only that, they undid the work of the ww1 vets.
Doesn’t change the valid point they were trying to make
Implying that wealth comes from hard work, nice one lol
Clearly they’re not referring to that type of wealth.
This straw man is favored by conservatives, so to be clear: On the left when we refer to the problem of “generational wealth” we typically aren’t concerned with pedestrian forms of inheritance like a family farm, a house, leftover retirement savings, and so forth. We have in mind the kind of dynastic inheritance that far exceeds the surplus of many lifetimes of labor, since it begets our current crop of billionaire global elites, individuals completely detached from the experience of their fellow man yet powerful enough to control markets and topple democracies.
We can quibble over where to draw that line, but deliberately misinterpreting someone to inject a leftist idea is not how we win anyone over.
What’s “well off their whole lives” look like you you?
He goes on to say
[Americans] were born into democracy and have no appreciation of what life is like without it. Chinese people, on the other hand, “have been bullied by rulers for thousands of years. We’re very familiar with these situations.”
Buddy that looks worse for you. The Chinese have been dealing with it for thousands of years but haven’t managed to do anything about it? If this was some kind of flex, it’s a weird one.
I don’t think you understand context he’s giving, or the gravity of the situation in the US right now at all if you cannot parse and understand this statement.
Regardless of whether you’ve had a chance to fully realize and experience what these freedoms are like, they are being taken away from you as you type here, and you’re too jaded to feel it happening and respond properly.
That’s his point. Like a rich kid who has been rich all his life, then slowly becomes poorer and poorer until completely out of money. Only until he’s actually out of money will he realize that.
Why do you think it’s “a flex?” Are you by any chance a relatively young man? (Because taking everything as a competition is most often associated with that demographic.)
It’s not “a flex”. It’s people being worried about the US. I am too, because while I’m not American, I also know that the US is a significant world power, especially military-wise. (As in lots of expensive gear, although the soldiers are second grade.)
Why do you take someone worrying for you as them trying hurt you?
Trump is hurting you. This guy isn’t. He’s trying to help.
This guy tries to hurt me when I go to sleep at night. He hides under my bed with one of those electric tennis racket that zaps bugs, or in my closet, or another inventive place, and then zaps me and runs away chortling. And he is always naked. Always.
“look how I’m making fun of political violence even existing”
Youre hilarious, brother
Don’t be a gloomy Gus, be a sunny Sam!
There’s an Americanism. There are dictatorships all over the world for millennia. They are incredibly hard to overcome. Source: world history.
Oh, no, poor willing slaves, born into a world they apathetically accept…
Is this the Chinese equivalent of the American “I’m too overworked to participate in politics”?
Lol there’s that Americanism again.
Ok boomer
That doesn’t even make any sense. Not that I expected anything.
America was never a democracy, all Trump did was pull the curtain back, the scene becomes the ob-scene. The people lament for the comfort of their illusions and parlor tricks.
Outta here with the nihilist BS.
You seem to be confused on the meaning of nihilism. Making observations are not nihilistic, we’ve only ever perceived reality through the lens of the elite, voted on candidates selected by the elite, our democratic choices nothing more than packaged products, marketed and sold to us. The advent of internet and social media have simultaneously broken the illusion and made it near impenetrable. Knowing truth is not a negation of truth itself, therefore it cannot be nihilism, I still hold onto meaning.
Your pedantic response to boot…
You have zero idea what you’re talking about. If you’re trying to play semantics by saying a Representative Democracy is not the same as a True Democracy, or that the Electoral System in the US is not what YOU would prefer. You are, in fact, still wrong.
You’re not making an observation, you’re asserting your own ill-informed position and slant on an idea you’ve heard elsewhere and have no idea what it means.
An oligarchy in democratic accroutements.
Okay, you’re clearly trying to level up the insanity of your comments with this pretentiousness. The italics…WOW 🤌
You’re either a second year Philosophy student, or just really like this which is…WOW.
Policy has only aligned with the will of the people 55% of the time. That’s not so bad, assuming we just ignore the observed and prevalent phenomenons of elite capture of public opinion and manufacturing of consent.
Of course, democracy exists when we discard the unsavory bits of reality, anything can be democracy when its meaning is an empty signifier.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
I’m not saying democracy can’t exist, it can and it should, but it’s only a fleeting notion in any society based on dominance hierarchy. Democracy does not exist without a well-informed public, a people plagued by ignorance do not have free will, and in consequence do not make their own decisions.
There is nothing representative or democratic about US democracy, if we are being honest with ourselves.
We define successful collective representation as Congress either passing a popular bill or defeating an unpopular one. By this metric, 55% of these 103 issues were collective representational successes.
I don’t think you read, or maybe understood what this was about and the metrics used, but that right there disproves your assertion. This is simply about the comparison of public opinion polling on specific bills. 45% was the other side.
This is policy, not democracy. Democracy is a wider swathe of things where policy is one portion. Your assertion that we’ve never lived in. Democracy because of this is faulty.
Truth is people don’t care. As long as their day to day is unaffected people don’t really care.
The concept of freedom and democracy was nothing more than the idea of an ethical order, or at least the perception of one.
