Crazy when an authoritarian country like China that can just execute people when they don’t stay on message, get way off message and say shit like this. Boomer’s who bitch about people not wanting to work anymore, this lets me truthfully respond with “even with a gun to their head, today’s hopeless work is probably worse than death”
Edit: Looks like I pissed off some tankies, too bad fuckers, China is an evil country with black souled sons of bitches at the helm, and that’s as an American with even more disgusting darker souled miserable sons of bitches at the helms of our branches of government. Get real and get over it. Xi is a Winnie the Pooh looking CUNT that can go fuck himself!!!
China is a authoritarian country, but it doesn’t have the resource and political will to capture and kill every person that doesn’t align with CCP.
Things can get pretty ugly (like death, torture, or removal of livelihood) for strong anti-governmental message, like bridgeman; significant public figure expressing dissent (even as a joke), like Bi Fujian, the host of the most popular variety show; or significant public event like wuyi (乌衣), Quanmei, and other activist in the chained woman incident.
But Chinese government is not going to kill someone for saying “I am so fucking overworked”. Arrest for telling the story to foreign media (which obviously is neither humane nor legal, I am not trying to defend CCP), maybe, but not worth any more serious punishment.
Um. In the U.S. I could still go for a walk outside, or out to the grocery store, or grab some fast-food at the drive-through. In China people were being boarded up in their homes… as in, literally boarded up with hammer and nails.
The anti-lockdown protest, later known as A4 revolution was triggered by Ürümqi fire where the firetruck was unable to reach the scene because no one dare to leave their residence to move their parked cars.
As a side note, A4 protest started as a single female student holding a piece of white paper in Nanjing Communication College for a entire day in solitude (the man in the picture is allegedly a teacher of the college, taking away her white paper)
Later the A4 (or “white paper”) symbolism extended to the entire globe as a pillar against oppression and censorship. We should all remember this brave young lady.
One of the things I learned reading Three Body Problem is that their police problems mirror the US a lot more than either country might realize. One of the characters is a cop who knows he’s supposed to act a certain way in investigations, but doesn’t give a shit. In other words, there’s an expectation that their police respect certain civil liberties, but they often don’t. Which is basically what happens in the US.
That book was originally published in 2008, though, and since then, Xi Jinping has been pushing things back to being more explicitly authoritarian. Oh, and the author has made some statements in support of that, so that’s great.
Can say I’ve definitely “stopped striving”, don’t know if it’s from Long Covid, living paycheck to paycheck cause my pay gets min/maxed for the business, personal infighting thanks to Fox News and Republican bullshit tearing apart and killing families over vaccinations, or maybe it’s just the weather 🤷♂️ lol fuck
Probably it has happened all over the history as well, not just right now. Wanting not to take the torch from the previous generation is a pretty normal thing to do for people in their 20s.
I mean you’d be pretty reluctant to grab a torch too if it was one that has been held on desperately by a generation 3 above yours that didn’t even want to hand it away but are literally decaying around as they grasp tightly onto it and the torch requires feeding babies to it even though they don’t burn just so you have an excuse to dump a bunch of oil on to help reduce them to ash a bit further.
I think being handed a torch to carry would be fine. This is not a passing of a torch but a wildfire that people are busy dancing around. And I’m definitely to shy to join the “let it burn” party.
Its just a generic filler article that gets posted about young people every year or two.
“Quiet Quitting” was the thing in 2022.
“Great Resignation” was the thing in 2021
You can find articles about this in 2019, 2016, omfg all over the place in the wake of 2008, “Jobless Recovery” from 2004 to 2006, in the 90s it was “Slackers” and in the 80s it was “Punks” and in the 70s and 60s it was “Hippies” and then back to Beatniks and Anarchists and of course, the old crowd favorite, Pinko Commies.
This is just a more recent mash up of the “China Bad” and “Nobody Wants To Work Anymore” meme
I thought this was kind of an old meme by now? I seem to remember it being reported on in english media by the late 2010’s, like 2018/2019, and the half-life of memes is pretty bad anyways + I would assume english media would get around to these things somewhat after they’d been spent anyways.
My bad, I was thinking of “躺平”, lying flat, as mentioned in the article.
In any case I think there’s definitely like, an element of this reporting that is, you know, relatively obvious in the amount of bias. You might compare this to, say, if china reported on like, growing incel movements, or something, as evidenced by the spread of andrew tate. Or, maybe better, the quiet quitting movement. They’re not technically incorrect, and those are pretty significant problems, but it’s also, you know, there’s a reason why they’re choosing to report on that, and not like. I dunno, something else. Say, toxic work culture. Sigma male grindsets. The total inverse, you will rarely see reported on by, you know, the fucking wall street journal. I have a skepticism for the motives of the media, is basically all I’m saying. I agree with the memes though the chinese government and chinese society et large kind of blows chunks, similarly faulted as is most of modern society broadly.
I’ll say this some time and someone will tell me I’m an idiot for quoting some awful person, but right now - not knowing if it is a quote or not - I love this
I’ve always thought the value of quotes (when they have any) is based entirely on their content rather than who spoke them. A smart quote from an awful person is still smart. And a dumb quote from a smart person is still dumb, like that definition of insanity one that often gets attributed to Einstein.
I’m sure there’s some sort of logical fallacy to be said about negating the quality of a quote based on the person who said it. Like, if Einstein said it, then it must be smart. If Hitler said it, then it must be evil. Etc.
Seems like the first use was in a life magazine article by someone who didn’t want to take explicit credit, so chances are it was something thought of by his students. And then it was repeated by various comedians over the years.
For what it’s worth, my quick skim of the author, William Sloane Coffin’s wiki makes him seem like a pretty great guy.
Propaganda. Every city has one or two neighborhoods (usually full of working class minorities) where police dump the homeless and addicts from everywhere else. Each of those areas has one or two particularly bad streets that look like shit and make for great fear mongering.
At the risk of sounding like propaganda myself… Just because you don’t witness poverty and crime doesn’t mean it is propaganda. US has a major homeless and drug epidemic that is getting worse. It is easy for those with money to put it out of sight and ignore it.
I’m visiting China for the first time right now for 2 weeks and I must say I’m very impressed with how clean the cities are and the lack of homeless and drug addicts.
In the US my old house in OKC has been broken into twice by homeless and my parent’s house in Miami twice as well, and their car stolen twice. Walking to work in Brooklyn, people are literally sleeping on the sidewalks under trash bags every night as everyone walks past like they aren’t there.
Even in my my home town in Vermont, population under 10,000, there are always homeless people out in the cold begging and sleeping in tents in the woods. These people have given up on life, or given bad luck, or addicted to drugs.
I haven’t seen any of that in China so far. Sure there are some areas outside the city centers that are more depressing looking, lack much personality, and have run down buildings but at least everyone has a home, a job, and is taken care of. People here seem to have more respect for themselves and for others. It is part of the culture here.
Everyone I talk to here says it is incredibly safe. In fact, today I saw my first 2 police cars on the highway for the first time a week into my trip. And we’ve been driving an average of 3 hours per day everywhere between Shenzhen and ChengDu (visiting factories ). There are many cameras everywhere but there isn’t a need for hundreds of police to patrol the streets non-stop like in every city in the US. I haven’t heard a single siren the entire trip either - in cities of 20 million. You won’t find that in NYC which has half the population. Just some thoughts I wanted to share, thanks for reading.
Oh there is absolutely poverty. I’m specifically referencing what the commenter above me was discussing, which is a trend on social media of finding a bad area of town, taking pictures from 40 different angles, and presenting it as though American cities are nothing but miles upon miles of tent encampments and despair. I will admit I have only ever lived in the rust belt, so it may very well be like that in other places, but in general you see one or two small areas of extreme poverty mixed with working class, a few rough-ish neighborhoods adjacent to those, and the rest is pretty quiet, if not always the most affluent. By your description, it sounds like Chinese law enforcement keeps closer tabs on people through mass surveillance rather than active patrolling. Personally I’d rather have more crime and fewer government CCTVs, but to each their own.
Side note: here at the airport you check your flight information by just walking up to a screen and it uses facial recognition to instantly pull up your flight information, gate, seat, etc. lol. Completely different comfort level with cameras here haha…
100% propaganda. Since Andrew Callaghan did his good faith SF video, every nut in the country in need of a haircut grabs their camera and shitty mic to go do bad gonzo journalism from skid row in order to dunk on people experiencing hell. Or worse, clout chase off of people experiencing hell.
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