258
It's also Americans getting to see that not only are things here bad, they're so bad people in other countries literally have trouble believing it.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
258 points (98.1% liked)
chapotraphouse
13669 readers
964 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
There was a Chinese guy on Twitter several years ago defending China's use of riot police during the Hong Kong riots using non lethal force, saying the rioters were destroying metro stations and damaging the trains/tracks and the police were right to intervene. They brought up how much more violent and deadly the reaction would be if masked rioters destroyed the Dallas or Atlanta subway systems.
Then libs dunked in him for thinking Dallas had a subway, and not addressing the factually correct statement that the gommunist authoritarian government used less force than freedomland
"Ha! These brainwashed foreigners think we have functional infrastructure, those fools"
I knew US healthcare was fucked up, but I had my moment of disbelief when a colleague with dual citizenship tried to explain to me what Americans go through to pay their taxes. I literally thought he was lying to me because surely every state in the world wants to make it as easy as possible for people who want to pay their taxes to actually do so. But the US is exceptional I guess.
I had to repeatedly explain to an American that the £107 she paid at the hospital was actually the entire cost she had to pay the NHS after they set her broken leg and put a cast on it, and there wasn't another bill coming for the rest. Then had to explain there wasn't a separate bill for the ambulance, and that the £107 was the increased cost non-UK citizens pay. She was convinced she was going to be paying £1000+ even with her insurance.
My partner was in a car accident and they needed surgery and a month stay in a hospital along with another month of physical therapy. Total cost? $560,000 big, beautiful US dollars. While they were in the ER still, we had to lawyer up and start suing. It's a disastrous system.
It's a disastrous system.
I think about this a lot. It literally is a disaster, a complete catastrophe; but Americans are so used to it that it’s invisible like the air around them. It’s too bad the term woke was co-opted because it really is like waking up. It doesn’t have to mean waking up to capitalism and becoming a Marxist. It can simply mean seeing through the veil of capitalist realism and the extremely bad situation we’re already in.
If we took a system that our country does reasonably well — let’s say food safety — and fucked it up as badly as our healthcare, I think people would be extremely unhappy. But with healthcare we’ve just never had it good to begin with.
I've started calling it out. My mom is specifically getting pissed off about it and it's cracking me up. Any casual it's just the way it is comment gets met with a no. You are allowing this to happen right now and stating it is what it is is defeatist. Eventually they gotta wake up to the reality we should be killing every single heathcare insurer and insurance worker till it's resolved. We pay them to deal with the care for us. So we also need to attack them when they completely fucking fail us.
God I fucking hate it here…
Tax preparation services are literally a ~$40B/year industry in the US and they lobby Congress to prevent changes. It seems like the only two options are to either keep things as-is or "simplify" the tax code which would be cloaked in something like a flat tax which would be a massive giveaway to the wealthy.
Nha, in Mexico we follow a similar system, except for some people the tax filing is every month. So they spend 3 or 4 days a month paying their taxes. I am an unregistered lumpen, so I don't pay income or payroll tax. And this it doesn't affect me. This is the situation for most people. But I tried to start a small business a few years ago, and the process to register for taxes was so bizantine I gave up. Mind you, this was during the pena nieto regime when they came up with a simplified mode for small business, it was way worse before, and I hear it is much more complicated now.
'Damn bitch you live like this' but for the country as a whole
Hillary Clinton walking into working class apartment.jpeg
Honestly we should just show them asmondgold, that would make them understand how bad things are here
Why would we do that to them
They deserve better
[wearing a TNG uniform] An Odorous Rat, The Sun Rising
Americans meeting Chinese people find out their government's propaganda is wrong
Chinese people meeting Americans find out their government's propaganda is right
American propaganda about China: AMERICAN EAGLE BURGER INSTITUTE CONFIRMS CHINA IS ABOUT TO COLLAPSE (series of 300 videos)
Chinese propaganda about America: Here is a text file detailing publicly accessible facts about America that you can find on their government websites
Reaction of eachs population:
murrican: FUCK YEAH THE COMMIES SUCK!11
Chinese: Come one, that's too absurd to be true.
Best communist propaganda is reality, lol.
“Literacy” was always the most basic tool of totalitarian propaganda. If you are not literate you can’t be fed communist propaganda. The most steadfast anti-communist I knew in my childhood was my maternal grandfather who was illiterate. Communist propaganda did not reach him
Even the quote tells on itself, there are and were illiterate comrades out there.
... well thats Marx, they say, 'thats Marx,' I mean I hear this all the time, I say you know I dont think US policy is so innocent, I mean you know we're out there helping and, 'well thats Marx' and I say oh well that guy Marx was really something you know? Here I am knocking myself out trying to make an analysis of something they give him the credit. Its pretty good, and then I realized something, that wasnt Marx, that wasnt Parenti, that was reality, thats what it was, reality happens to be Marxist.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Sounds like China’s propaganda is just truth 
propaganda is just a red scare loanword for publicity, but americans get pounded into their heads that it means something is a lie. since liberals do their best to ignore class they get to be "objective" and somehow free of class bias
Fr I hate how people have started saying "propaganda" as a synonym for "disinformation" when that's already a common word
Actually propaganda is portrayed as a tool or method to influence peoples opinions on something usually political. I don’t know where you got “lie” from but it’s not always a lie just trying to influence you. Some truths can also be used as climate change activists will use burning forests or climate disasters for visual effect but is ultimately climate change propaganda that works effectively.
I think I must have been unclear, I'm saying it gets portrayed as false because it has an agenda
You don't know where they got lie from? You've never ever heard propaganda used pejoratively?
Propaganda used to mean to just promote/publicize something. USA used so much lies it started to mean lies in USA ig (just a hypothesis)
I think the wildest ones are americans looking at Chinese grocery hall videos in awe over the quality and price of their food. That one hurts
First as a tragedy, second as a farce.
So basically, a similar thing to what happens in the United States happens in China, but in reverse, where the United States spins stuff or outright makes shit up about China and the American people take it hook, line, and sinker, whereas in China, they just tell their people straight-up about evil things the United States does without spin, but the people think "No, it can't be THAT bad, the government MUST be lying to us to make the United States look bad"?
my impression after being on the app is that while america is constantly saying "evil china this, evil china that", china just straight up isn't thinking about us. what clued me into that was, i was watching a live where a chinese and american were talking. the chinese person said her first american movie she remembered watching was high school musical, and half jokingly asked if school was really like that here. the american informed her that no, schools here are generally unpleasant, and dangerous, and there's a huge risk of being shot in school. the chinese girl seemed actually shocked to hear about school shootings, like she had never heard that was happening here in her life. she straight up could not wrap her brain around it. that it happened, let alone that it's a common occurrence.
meanwhile, we're all still hearing about the same knife attack that happened forever ago in china, that despite us hearing about, we also get told that the EVIL CEECEEPEECOMMUNIST CCP PARTY OF COMMUNIST CHINA covers it up.
it's so blatantly obvious what's going on here. china has their own shit going on to worry about where as america has nothing good going on so we're constantly being told to "look over there at their problems"
Saw a video on YouTube a while back of some South Koreans being shown footage of everyday neighborhoods in the US where gun fights broke out. They a) couldn't believe how poor the infrastructure was; and b) holy shit people get shot at in broad daylight?
They were in complete disbelief how crime wasn't addressed by ending poverty. They immediately understood people rob or deal drugs to make money, which is why people were shooting at one another. They had assumed that Americans were all rich since it's a wealthy country.
Literally like in the late USSR.
We have that effect on people lol
Hes literally called Berger
view more: next ›