Some questions I have:

  • Do people in China have to boil their water before drinking it? I've found sources dated as recent as 2012 saying this
  • If I were to move to China, what western media would I have to be prepared to not have access to anymore? Just as one example, could I still follow/listen to American & European rock/metal bands?
  • After several years doing jobs that I didn't like very much, I finally recently moved to a job in an area that I like a lot (renewable energy). How easy would it be for me to find similar work in China? Sometimes it seems like the only work Americans can find in China is as English teachers.
  • Why does China accept so few immigrants? (500-2000 per year, vs about 1,000,000/year accepted by the USA, and 600,000-2,000,000/yr accepted by Germany)
  • Regarding sex, dating & family, is China generally more liberal than the US, more conservative, or about the same?
  • Does housing work in China similarly to how it works in the US? How much of their income do Chinese people typically spend on rent/homeownership?
  • chiefecula [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    declining material conditions are going to magically turn everyone into a leftists

    That's not quite how it works.

    Look, the fake news tells everyone the line is all time high and the US is the richest country in the world. But at the same time, the cost of living is going up while the wages stagnate. So people make more and more money but they don't get richer..? Where does all the money go? Where's all the profit, it literally doesn't add up. Obviously someone has to steal that money away from them, like it has to go somewhere, right? And that's where the populism comes in. The leftist say the rich hide the money in the offshore accounts and we need to make them pay. That's all well and good, but the problem is, the left isn't the only kind of populism.

    Another option is to say "you make enough money, but then the evil government steals it from you to give it to the welfare queens, so the government and the minorities are the bad guys.

    The people are hurting, the people are angry. The people need a villain to blame for the shitty situation they're in. And the rich are more than happy to spend billions of dollars to throw the minorities under the bus. Many normies literally have never ever heard anything about the left besides the propaganda that says the commies are more evil than the nazis.

    Declining material conditions push people away from the liberal "nothing will fundamentally change" bullshit once the status quo stops working for them. People want the change, so they become populist. But that doesn't necessarily mean left populist, a lot of people are going into the right wing populism instead. Which isn't surprising at all with at least a century long process of brainwashing people into thinking communism is hell.

    And the whole "are going to" part is also a complete fucking nonsense. This thing has been happening for a while. Just in the last ten years there's been a Tea Party movement AND Trump Q bullshit. Less and less people support the libs because the living conditions get worse and worse, that's true. But while the left is definitely more alive and than it was ten years ago, that's not good enough. Even without the global warming, the left needs to grow faster than the right, and that's not where we are currently.