• Beaver [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 days ago

    It was especially funny seeing all the “lots of colorful lights doesn’t mean prosperity” responses. Which is kinda true… until power becomes so expensive and unreliable in Mississippi that the concept of wasting it on lighting up buildings at night becomes unimaginably ostentatious.

    • Gucci_Minh [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 days ago

      Yeah the coloured lights are because Chinese urban planners really like gaudy flashy stuff, and Chinese PR is run by people who have no idea how to do effective propaganda so they just keep posting the colourful buildings. Beneath all that flashiness is a shitload of real infrastructure that they really should be advertising instead. You’d reach much more people talking about how you can just call 12345 and get a pothole filled in a day than going wow look at our LEDs that westerners will dismiss as a potemkin village anyways.

      • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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        10 days ago

        Honestly i think it’s a good sign that the Chinese are so bad at doing propaganda directed at the West. In order to effectively convince Westerners you have to understand how we think, and that in itself requires that you become at least partly infected by our cultural mind virus. So it’s good that the Chinese are so far removed from our toxic ways of thinking that they can’t even put themselves in the shoes of Western audiences. The more alien our cynical, misanthropic, sociopathic, hyper-individualist culture is to the Chinese people, the better for China.

        • Gucci_Minh [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          9 days ago

          True, but they’re also really bad at doing propaganda for internal consumption too so I don’t know if that’s the cause specifically. It is a good point you bring up though because despite the

          cynical, misanthropic, sociopathic, hyper-individualist culture

          It seems like whenever people trainpost about Chinese high speed rail it gets really good reception on Western social media aside from the obligatory reddit-logo copypastas. Maybe I’m just more hopeful for Westerners than they are for themselves but it does look like there are pockets of good people out there, just very disenfranchised and alienated.

          • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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            9 days ago

            It seems like whenever people trainpost about Chinese high speed rail it gets really good reception on Western social media

            But how much of that is because high speed rail is seen as just another “treat”?

            • Gucci_Minh [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              9 days ago

              Fuck it lol I’ll take it, if public transit gets widespread support because people can frame it as treats, it is better than not having public transit and the current paradigm of “I’d rather sit in traffic for 4 hours a day than sit next to the poors”.