Lots of centrists crying "propaganda" at videos like this fail to grasp the fundamental reality that the average American has a *noticeably* lower quality of life than the average person in Europe, East Asia, or the Gulf.
Reposted from
Leah McElrath
It’s not just young people reacting to what they’re seeing on Red Note about life in China.
Some of the people that I’ve seen who have most affected are older.
What this man says at the end of the clip below is widely expressed by all ages.
Full video:
www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2JQjEXn/
Some of the people that I’ve seen who have most affected are older.
What this man says at the end of the clip below is widely expressed by all ages.
Full video:
www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2JQjEXn/
Comments
East Asia has a suicide problem right now because of their "higher quality of life". The Middle East is literally a bunch of welfare states propped up by oil income. And Europe, well some of them have a higher standard of living.
Just like your High-school friend's Facebook picture don't show their real life.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/forbrn.t04.htm
Wages are very low. I taught a group of Slovakian teachers in Barcelona (paid for by the EU on a study visit). But they’re also not saddled with runaway inflation. They were happy, had iPhones etc.
America is a hellhole but its orders of magnitude better for the average human than the UAE is for the average human
Seriously?
You do know who just got elected president--for the second time, right?
Right?
This is not "given". This is about choosing--far less than what we as a country can afford b/c we choose to be deliberately ignorant.
PS - China in no way is better off than we are.
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, and people don't take shots when debtor's prison is a possibility.
I really do think a lot of this comes down to culture. If the United States was New England and California, it’d probably surpass Europe. But there’s the south, so what can you do?
The US has a QOL comparable to the nations you listed (though I take serious issue with the inference that the Gulf states are a nice place to live) while being wealthier than almost all of those nations. So yeah. Insane take.
Also in East Asia and the Gulf, the quality of life you’re seeing for the top %0.5 in these propaganda videos is propped up by a massive exploited underclass, and de facto slavery in many cases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
We have great infrastructure for car dependent suburbs by choice and at the expensive of other infra. It’s not because we’re “less rich.”
But then we can’t ignore the culture disparity. America is about the individual, China is about the collective - family-extended family-local district-local government all the way up. An inbuilt social responsibility.
Qualifier: I’m an admitted sinophile (culture not government)