What's annoying to me is having to lead coworkers though a rational thought exercise about "do you really think we're divided? as compared to what? how exactly do you measure division?" and so forth just to get them to admit it's mostly some generalized feeling and not some rationally considered measure.
I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this. Americans love a common enemy, and if they caught wind of how much they are truly being manipulated it might shift the narrative. Maybe that would embarrass too many citizens to realize the stuff they mindlessly parrot is largely a planted narrative.
Their misinformation campaigns wouldn't work if there weren't real core issues with the society. The internet has empowered a generation the sees whats behind the curtain.
AOC said it best: Millennials have seen a situation where 9/11 happened in Middle School, the GFC happened in college and now the covid disaster has screwed hoards of millennials once again when they are trying to purchase a home and get on their feet. Majority of millennials have never seen a time of economic prosperity in their lifetimes. It is the complete opposite to what their parents experienced. With this reality is it any wonder where there is massive discontent that results in this division? The system has failed them.
This exaggerated view is unfortunately quite common. It completely ignores the crises that previous generations had to go through, from WWII and the Korean War, to Vietnam, to depopulation of rural areas, to the Oil Crisis, to massive pollution in modern cities, to the mass lay-off of industrial workers starting in the 1980s, to inflation rates of 15-20%, etc, etc.
If you look at the raw numbers of how Boomers prospered in their life cycle and compare it to the trajectory of Millennials it tells a clear and jarring picture. Even more so for Gen Z which explain why they are eschewing capitalism at far greater numbers than Millennials ever did. Note: all of my comments applies to a lesser extent to GenX as well but AOC was referencing Millennials since she is one. The point is if you look at the trajectory from Gen X onwards it paints a picture of decline in most aspects of life.
WWII is really the Silent + Greatest Generation and does not excuse the decline that started after Boomers.
Also, the Korean and Vietnamese wars were about fighting communism and imposing Western democracy on the East
Did previous generations have the same regulations in place that cause companies to restrict employment in crappy jobs to less than 40 hours a week so you need to move between job sites or work unsteady 'gig' jobs on the side? To avoid some mandatory benefits?
In exchange we have cheap Chinese produced crap that shows the mirage of wealth but in reality there are external costs to all this tech that is not priced in when you go to pay for it. Costs such as the slave wages paid to the people who produce them and the environmental cost to produce and dispose. If US consumers had to pay the true cost of all these toys then it would expose the wage gap much more clearly.
A large amount of US politicians sold out to both China and Russia long ago. We recently had a president over $200 million in near outstanding personal debt to the CCP...
Check out which group of US senators and representatives went to have tea time with Putin on one of the recent 4th of Julys.
All of our manufacturing infrastructure is over there. There's no going back, because they're somehow able to dupe their constituents into believing they're actually hard on them while lining their pockets, especially with regards to China. Celebrities and corporations have also sold out.
It's going to be a great day of reckoning if some of these people ever learn that their leaders who've always told them they're hard on China and fighting against them are... actually not, lol.
Trump's mainland China nickname amongst the educated and literate is "Nation Builder" for a reason. With reference to their nation, not the United States. Certainly weird times we're in.
You still haven't universally grasped very simple things the rest of the world nailed almost a century ago. Little things like "vaccines are good", "Nazis are bad" or "Universal healthcare is a basic human right"
I get its a pretty young country all things considered but these are fundamental basics.
Granted you're very correct that American health care got way too profit driven which is causing accessibility and standard of care to suffer, but EU healthcare is not without its issues, just different issues.
Because CCP/Russia have already incorporated this into their disinformation campaigns. Anything anti-china is attacked as racist/nationalist. It got so radioactive that the government had to change the pattern they used to name pandemics.
What pattern is that, exactly? Looking at the Wikipedia list of worldwide pandemics with more than 1 million deaths[0], only two were named after places, and one of those ("Spanish flu") was the result of wartime misinformation and/or racism.
Admittedly the other example on that list is "Hong Kong flu" from 1968–1969, but there are other recent outbreaks which are not included, like SARS, Swine flu, and Bird flu.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Major_epidem...
That pattern used now (e.g. for COVID-19) is this:
World Health Organization Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases (2015)
https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/WHO_...
This is an improvement, as they note, on names that "provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities". The world has moved on since the "Spanish Flu" was named.
But I think that saying "the government had to change the pattern they used to name pandemics [because of China specifically]" is likely a misattribution and oversimplification of these guidelines.
The idea that "the government names pandemics" is both too general - a government is a huge diverse structure, if this was a governmental role, some named health body within it would have this responsibility; and also too specific - "the" government? which country's government would take on that role?
And it's not accurate - this is not any one country's government's role. Point of fact, COVID-19 was named by WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
A/Victoria/2570/2019 or A/Wisconsin/588/2019
A/Cambodia/e0826360/2020
B/Washington/02/2019
B/Phuket/3073/2013
> Anything anti-china is attacked as racist/nationalist.
This response always comes up when someone tries to point out racist and nationalist anti-china motivations, so clearly this argument is propaganda as well /s.
> It got so radioactive that the government had to change the pattern they used to name pandemics.
The Spanish Flu was named that way precisely so everyone would blame Spain. The participants of WWI censored any mention of the pandemic until the war was over, so Spain served as a convenient scapegoat.
This paper published by Harvard is an analysis of actual CCP propaganda tactics [1]. Arguing with people online about an issue you dislike just brings more attention to it. Instead, propaganda generally serves to distract. The average Redditor has no direct impact foreign policy in China, but they can riled up enough to cause politicians to focus on placating them rather than geopolitics. Indeed, if you observe the Russian propaganda ads on Facebook, they have nothing to do with Russia [2]. They're simply meant to sow discord.
[1] https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf
[2] https://cbsnews.com/media/russian-ads-on-facebook-a-gallery/
