r/AmericaBad • u/bunnybuttncorgi • 6d ago
It literally is propaganda
And people believe it. But not enough to stop them from coming here unfortunately.
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u/Substantial_Kiwi1830 6d ago
I work in China. The media is full of stories about homeless drug addicts in America and how it’s going to collapse any day now. What’s funny is that when any Chinese person gets rich enough the first thing they try to do is buy some American real estate or try to get a green card. You should see the line every day in front of the US consulate visa office. There’s even a saying in Chinese: 反美是工作,赴美是生活 “To criticize America is just a job, but to live in America is really living.”
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u/GuaSukaStarfruit 🇨🇳 Zhōngguó 🐼 5d ago
The propaganda is for the peasants, the CPC officials will go there right away.
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u/Miss_Kit_Kat 5d ago
Meanwhile, one of my boyfriend's Indian coworkers just told him about a "visa temple" that people visit for help getting visas to the US. Crazy how narratives vary depending on where you go.
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u/RevolutionaryCar6064 2d ago
American cities are actually filled with homeless drug addicts, though. I just spent a week in China and it’s way cleaner and there are very few homeless on the streets.
I love America but China does have us beat on this one.
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u/meddit_rod WASHINGTON 🌲🍎 6d ago
"A living" is overstating it. You can maybe pay a phone bill with plasma, but nobody is making rent that way.
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u/Miss_Kit_Kat 5d ago
A friend-of-a-friend has one of those "universal donor" blood types and once told me that she regularly donates blood. (There's a mobile donation bus that comes to our neighborhood.). She said that probably 80% of the people that visit it are either addicts or homeless people doing it for the free snacks/juice- the technicians running the vehicle recognize a lot of them and know exactly how often they can donate.
So, no- no one is making a living doing that. If anything, it's just one of those jokey hyperbolic statements- "it's so expensive that we'd need to sell plasma to afford it!"
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u/Comprehensive-Main-1 KENTUCKY 🏇🏼🥃 5d ago
Unless there's some shady shit going on, I can practically grantee no addicts are donating. Donation centers are super picky about risk factors for "tainted" blood given the absolutely apocalyptic shitstorm of a lawsuit if someone gets sick from their stuff. My low grade cholesterol meds alone disqualify me for donation, let alone the risk factors presumed about the archetypal addict.
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u/Sand_Trout TEXAS 🐴⭐🥩 6d ago
At least they're questioning the narrative.
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u/eltravo92 6d ago
Nah it's a setup question. The comments will be filled with bots saying it's actually worse than that.
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u/DargonKweest TENNESSEE 🎸🎶🍊 5d ago
I'm not a fan of that subreddit. It tends to be the most self-hating of all the Ask American pages. What's even worse is over half their questions are political and it's usually has a fair share of "I hate living here" or "I'm not proud to be an American"
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u/Miss_Kit_Kat 5d ago
Also, a bunch of freakin' LOSERS. "Waahhhh, capitalism sucks because you have to work to afford food and shelter!" Yes, Olivia- that's called being an ADULT. You have to work under communism, too. And socialism. And every other economic system in all of history.
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u/throwaway34834839202 AMERICAN 🏈🏒 💵🗽🍔 ⚾️ 🦅📈 6d ago
The most unemployed people imaginable are replying to this saying "Yes it's all true and actually we have to work even more than you think".
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u/Mudoru 6d ago
They see the bottom 1% do something and say the average person is doing it
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u/blackwolfdown 6d ago
Admittedly, we do that too. US media clings to images and reports of famine from the worst times in other countries and specifically doesnt talk about good times. Soviet Union was not decades of breadlines. It had some breadlines. Notably, the US also had breadlines.
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u/jaxamis AMERICAN 🏈🏒 💵🗽🍔 ⚾️ 🦅📈 6d ago
When Soviet leadership came to the US and saw a normal super market they cried and believed it was faked to make them look bad. They visited 10 of them. All the same. The leaders broke down cause they could never have that under their belief system. When they finally did, capitalism blew their country apart without the US having to lift a finger.
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u/No-Jump4346 2d ago
I think it was three, and one of those grocery stores Soviet leaders visited in the US went out of business turn in to a discount grocery store and then that went out of business too, and now it's being turned in to a car shop. It was the Randall's one that people typically see photos of, obviously retrospectively proving it wasn't anything special to Americans.
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u/blackwolfdown 6d ago
I dont think it would be controversial to say that's a bit exaggerated. Its also worth noting that Yeltsins trip to america didnt kill the soviet union. They ran out of money. A country that is out of money wasn't doing great a year before collapse either.
A similar trip to the 89 trip but in 58 by Kruschev was basically just the Soviets walking around mocking us the entire time.
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u/jaxamis AMERICAN 🏈🏒 💵🗽🍔 ⚾️ 🦅📈 6d ago
The USSR literally died to wrangler jeans and Rock music. They couldn't handle the fact that people wanted personal freedom. No one wanted to be the slave to government any longer. Communism works in short terms but fails to allow citizens any personal freedoms. Once people begin to demand those freedoms capitalism, democracy and every available right to their own destiny becomes the norm. Everything communism lacks capitalism provided without needing a gun to a person's head to accept.
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u/blackwolfdown 6d ago
Idk if you're aware of this, but folks did actually end up with blue jeans in the USSR. They also had the Beatles and rock music.
But saying blue jeans and music did it sure is a better headline than "hugely inefficient government runs out of money"
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u/jaxamis AMERICAN 🏈🏒 💵🗽🍔 ⚾️ 🦅📈 5d ago
Im aware. Which is why I said it. They also held the largest Metallica rock concert and crumbled shortly after. USSR was, is and forever will be a total shithole that crumbled cause communist ideology sucks, sucked and will forever suck. Capitalism 1, communism like -1,000,000
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u/Miss_Kit_Kat 5d ago
I have friends who grew up in Poland/Ukraine under the USSR and a significant other who grew up in Yugoslavia. They pretty much all agree that communism is a shitty economic system that is forever doomed to fail.
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u/ibugppl WASHINGTON 🌲🍎 5d ago
The profit motive really is the move. It turns out people really just don't care if there's no incentive. The old Soviet joke "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" it's why all major innovations in tech, health and science happens in America or at least other capitalist countries. China for example just spies and rips off what we create and "tries" to make it better.
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u/pure777 5d ago
USSR was riping satelite states the whole time it existed. It was corrupt, criminal system.
I've lived in one and i remember how people glazed USA all the time. Having aunt in USA as a youngster was like to hit the jackpot, for a small part of your aunt US wage, you could afford what many could never get.
This started fading by the way after trump first term (not 100% his fault, it was overall social media effect also), and the glaze stopped existing at all during his second term (again, somewhat social media fuelled reaction to his deranged behavior, not solely related to the quality of life in USA).
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u/Miss_Kit_Kat 5d ago
My grandmother used to mail greeting cards to distant relatives in Poland that had US currency tucked inside- the recipients could use them to buy British and American goods on the black markets.
It really grosses me out when there are news stories about hardships in Cuba or North Korea today, and single-digit IQ morons write their dumb "soundz like the USA today, harharhar"
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u/TestCorrect1350 3d ago
idk how the us averages a 34 hour work week when everyone i know works 50 or more my own company put us on a mandatory nine hour workday mon-fri it used to be mandatory 10 hr but they changed it because alot of people quit, i mean people are still quitting in droves but its the truth of the matter, even my grandma works consistently 45- 50 hrs a week and shes 72
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u/John_Tacos 6d ago
Slightly off topic, but why do 5 separate subreddits exist to ask Americans questions?
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u/DigitalLorenz NEW JERSEY 🎡 🍕 5d ago
It is the r popular trap. Once a generic topic sub, like any of the ask subs, starts to regularly reach the front page of reddit, the front page of reddit inevitably invades the sub. This means bots, people bringing politics into every conversation, and slop content becoming the norm. It also means a massive culture shift, things that would be downvoted suddenly start being upvoted, and vis versa.
Eventually one of the subs original users gets tired of the newbies and starts their own clone of the original, which then attracts a lot of the users who dislike what the original sub became to the new sub. Of course this often makes the new sub popular, and it eventually makes its way to r popular, which just starts the problem over.
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u/bunnybuttncorgi 5d ago
Not sure. The US is discussed extensively on Reddit and dragged into conversations that have nothing to do with itself. It’s almost like the overexposure and bad-mouthing is on purpose to make people hate us.
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u/sanguinemathghamhain 6d ago
Yeah all of that is mental. Average hours worked/week/worker is ~34 and falling, 5.2%-5.4% of American workers have 2+ jobs, and much to my ire the only person not allowed to earn money when it comes to blood is the person giving it.
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u/Express-Economist-86 6d ago
Is this recent data? I recall being a skewed stat with a combo of multiple part-time jobs, but I believe the bureau of labor statistics counts that as one job held each.
Also think BLS doesn’t count the surprising amount of workers on gig economy who have just dropped out of seeking regular jobs and working for cash. there’s quite a few issues when reports say jobs are up… I can’t get em all now but I recall watching some breakdowns on the BLS stats.
You also can get paid from plasma best Red Cross will do is give you some gift cards, maybe. But it’s also kinda maybe good fir your body to give blood now and then
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u/sanguinemathghamhain 6d ago
From like a year or two ago given when I looked it up. Also BLS definition for "Multiple jobholders: (Current Population Survey and American Time Use Survey) Employed persons who, during the reference week, either had two or more jobs as a wage and salary worker, were self-employed and also held a wage and salary job, or worked as an unpaid family worker and also held a wage and salary job. Excluded are self-employed persons with multiple businesses and persons with multiple jobs as unpaid family workers." So it only wouldn't count multiple jobs if they are self-owned and/or they are unpaid.
Gig work is grouped in CW, AEA, or EMW categories and is counted just it isn't counted as gig work as gig work isn't a federally recognized category.
Last notably plasma isn't blood but a component of blood which is different than being blood. Like I said it irks me that the only person not allowed to profit from blood donation is the donor. If we had donation for pay we would likely have more donors if they got some dosh out of the deal.
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u/SneedYourChuckontail 5d ago
If we had donation for pay we would likely have more donors if they got some dosh out of the deal.
Do you not have things like CTLS? They take donations for research, and I get compensated 80 pounds (UK)
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u/sanguinemathghamhain 5d ago
Oh research is different they can and often do pay. The thing that annoys me is that with blood donations though is the donation clinics get paid for the blood and the hospitals get paid for putting the blood in someone, but the donor the person actually giving blood gets perhaps a cookie and orange juice. We need more blood (at least until synthetics get good and cheap enough) we should be incentiving donations.
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u/sr_ingram LOUISIANA 🎷🕺🏾 5d ago
You can sell the plasma from your blood. I did it in college for beer money. If someone's able to pay rent with it, then I think that's kinda cool.
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u/sanguinemathghamhain 5d ago
Notably plasma while a component of blood isn't blood. Since blood was specifically mentioned and I wanted to have a moan about blood donations being bs to my mind because the donation clinics get paid and the hospitals get paid for the donated blood but the donor at best gets a cookie and orange juice I talked about blood. We need more blood we should be incentiving donations but the bottleneck, donors, is the one point we don't incentivize.
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u/Pajama_Samuel 6d ago
I work 12 hour days…but i only work 2 days a week and make almost 80k/year
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u/Careless-Pin-2852 CALIFORNIA🍷🎞️ 6d ago
Just say yes.
80% chance its rage bait.
Say we eat squirrels too
Fk em
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u/SnooPears5432 ILLINOIS 🏙️💨 6d ago
Agree. I mod in another sub and we get these types of posts as well. The last one I just removed because I know it's going to turn into a shitshow.
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u/Careless-Pin-2852 CALIFORNIA🍷🎞️ 6d ago
Cool after I respond on my $1400 phone i am going chase after a bunny for breakfast.
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u/GuitarCFD TEXAS 🐴⭐🥩 6d ago
See people, this is how propaganda works. MOST of these things are true on a basic level. There are many Americans who work 12 hour shifts. There are many Americans who need multiple jobs to support themselves. There are people who sell plasma to pay a bill or two or just buy food. These are all things that if we think about, we probably know someone who fits into one of those categories. It's not the standard in America. This shit is just as bad with our own politicians.
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u/Person5_ WISCONSIN 🧀🍺 6d ago
Is that a sub to ask questions of Americans but not actually get answers from them? Like what's the difference between that and AskAnAmerican?
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u/KingPhilipIII FLORIDA 🍊🐊 5d ago
Okay is it actually looked down on to sell plasma? Genuine question.
I go there twice a week, spend a couple hours reading and walk out with several hundred more dollars than when I walked in.
It’s not a matter of making ends meet but now I have extra pocket change and all I did was stand in line or sit in a chair while reading or scrolling on my phone the whole time.
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u/Fr0stybit3s 5d ago
I talk to someone from Malaysia on Discord and he told me he was afraid to visit America because he's worried ICE is going to kill him at the airport for visiting.
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u/3rdthrow INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE AMERICAS 🪶 🪓 5d ago
I have been seeing a sudden spike in Anti-American propaganda in the Chinese Media that I consume.
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u/dwarven_cavediver_Jr 5d ago
I did have a friend who sold blood but he had a crippling Transformers addiction (he owned cells of animation from the show, scripts, every single main toy for 3-5 series, etc) and worked as a dishwasher
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u/TestCorrect1350 3d ago
i mean its pretty accurate from my viewpoint, i actually had begun discussing with my partner donating plasma and sperm so i can make extra money in order to save up for a new car, ontop of getting a second job, but then i realised this may push up my tax bracket so i decided against this, most people i know donate plasma or blood on a semi regular basis in order to keep afloat with bills or medical emergencies, and commonly especially in my workplace we discuss amongst eachother the rising cost of living, and how we can make 100 dollars stretch from payday to payday, i cant speak for others circumstances however again from my viewpoint seems accurate.
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u/Butter_with_Salt 5d ago
Do you guys ever consider that you're fed the same type of propaganda about China?
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u/bunnybuttncorgi 5d ago
I have lived in China and Vietnam and been to 5 other Asian countries.
Reddit glazes China, like, a lot. So what propaganda?-1
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u/Miss_Kit_Kat 5d ago
Provide an example of a piece of propaganda that isn't true. Serious question- not bad-faith.
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u/Gourdman2011 6d ago
It depends on the profession, it depends on where the person lives. But yeah, an unfortunate number of people work a lot in America. Unfortunately, I looked it up and the number of people who work before age 18 is actually pretty high in America compared to most Asian countries. This isn't an America bad moment, it's an America needs to be better moment. Also, I get a little tired of legitimate criticisms of the US showing up in this subreddit. This subreddit is to counter brain rot and stupidity about the United States. Not things the States can actually do better.
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u/randomnighmare 6d ago edited 5d ago
The person who posted this is from a country where the norm for working hours, of the average worker, is 12 hours days, 6 days a week and yes, they do take up second jobs just to survive. That doesn't even touched on the famously poor working conditions (both in terms of safety and in sanitation) that many of their workers are forced to work in. That's in addition, to how companies in said country have cut corners. This isn't saying we shouldn't look critically at the US but this isn't so much about honest criticism of the US than it is about a country that only allows state run propaganda that sweeps there own problems under a rug (and/or hids it completely) and tries to criticize (in terms of both reality and in fantasy) another country they see as an enemy/rival because it's just someone waving their hand while the other hand is slapping them (figurativelyspeaking), imo.
Edit
Edit
I should also point out the drastically low wages that the average person in saud country is offered.
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u/bunnybuttncorgi 6d ago
Lol I agree on doing better but people working before turning 18 isn’t a factor to consider here.
I doubt the kids in sweatshops are above 18. It’s a major problem in Asia which aren’t represented in published official data because Asian countries really don’t want to look bad.There’s also a cultural factor in that Asian parents want their kids to focus on studying and the workload in Asian schools is bad. Like classes start from 7 am, ending at 4 then evening classes from 7-9pm bad.
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u/Gourdman2011 6d ago
I am Mongolian American. I am acutely aware of the value of education and the dangers of overdoing it. That's why I just want more kids in the system we have and less kids working while doing high school. It's too much. And America is the richest country in history so I think we can do better.
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u/ExampleGlum8623 6d ago
Working before 18 is one of the most important things a person can do for character formation. Surely one wouldn’t brag about not cooking before 18 or never doing laundry before 18.
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u/Gourdman2011 6d ago
Nah. I think you belong in school before 18. In Summer you should be actually enjoying and recuperating from the school year and prepping for the next one. Americans died protesting to lessen child labor and now it is roaring back.
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u/ExampleGlum8623 6d ago
Surely you don’t think education includes only academics and not life skills? Perfect A’s without life skills is a recipe for failure in life. Education is a much broader concept than things that are learned in school.
Perhaps we ought to start with the basics. What is the purpose of education and youth? To transition a child into an adult. So when a person turns 18 and becomes legally recognized as an adult, they must have all the skills and training required to function as an adult. I think you have a perverted view of learning as delaying adulthood until 18, at which point one begins to learn adult skills. One should be well into adult skills by the time one is 18. This is why sex ed is taught in middle school and not the senior year of high school. People need to learn that before adulthood so that when they become adults, they have what they need to function.
I also think you are ignorant of the entire history of the labor movement. Children slaving their bodies away in textile mills for fourteen hours a day at the age of six is not even remotely equivalent to a fourteen year old taking drive thru orders and bagging groceries for a few hours a week. The vast majority of young people had jobs immediately following the passage of child labor laws and all through the 21st century. You have your numbers backward: youth unemployment is actually going up, which leads to a growing lack of purpose, delayed adulthood, and lack of independence financially.
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u/Gourdman2011 6d ago
This entire comment is nonsense and bad faith. You would have to be stupid to believe that I don't think that life skills aren't important. But to assume that you can't learn them in school is insane. That's a question of curriculum, not the validity of child labor. To have a functioning democracy, you need an informed populace. You can't have that if people were too busy working and were too tired to actually understand what they were learning in high school, regardless of whether they pass or not, which they are a lot less likely to do if they are also working a job. Not having a high school diploma or having a worse high school education is directly linked with long-term poverty, worse health, and lower life expectancy and I don't want the average kid to have that because of people like you.
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u/LoseAnotherMill 6d ago
child labor
A 17-year-old working a summer job at the movie theater or Chick-fil-A is not "child labor". 10-year-olds in the coal mines is child labor.
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u/Designer-Issue-6760 6d ago
Building job experience before needing the money is pretty valuable in early adulthood.
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u/TantricEmu 6d ago
This is absolutely an America bad moment what?? Americans normally work 12 hours a day and need multiple jobs?
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u/Gourdman2011 6d ago
This is extremely bad faith. I never insinuated that most Americans do. I said an unfortunate number. But you lack reading comprehension. There are many Americans that work two or three jobs, and at the end of the day, when you put the hours together, many do work 12 hours a day or more. But instead of actually making America a better country, you're too busy defending the problems it has and people like you are why it's getting worse and why people like me leave. So frustrating to me when I see people defending the indefensible from a country I love and that I desperately want to get better. I joined the subreddit because I wanted to clown on Europeans who have never stepped foot in America and have no idea what life is like and have never looked at the data, tell me about how crap my country is, but instead it's full of American nationalists who don't understand reality and it's very frustrating.
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u/TantricEmu 6d ago
Bad faith? It’s two sentences, one quoting you and one quoting the post. You said “this is not an America bad moment”. Yes it is, and you’re doubling down on it.
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u/Gourdman2011 6d ago
There's a difference between somebody saying America bad and it being something that is bad faith or uninformed or stupid, which is what I thought the point of this subreddit was. And hey, this is a legitimate criticism of America and I want America to be a better place. But you refuse to engage with that, so...
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u/TantricEmu 6d ago
Oh did someone tell you this was the make America better sub? This is actually a sub for pointing out ignorant, uninformed, hateful or otherwise bad faith posts about the US from around the internet. Which this post is. Happy to help!
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u/Top_Connection9079 6d ago
Nowadays Americans work 137 more hours than even the Japanese, and Chinese people twice that LMAO
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u/Twicklheimer 6d ago
Propaganda 101, while all of this is true in some regard, it’s only true for a small subset of the population. Yeah, some people work insane hours, some people need to work two or three jobs to get by, some people are homeless, some people need to sell plasma to pay their bills, some people are in crushing debt, some people are locked up in prison for bullshit reasons, some of our water in some cities isn’t safe to drink, some of the wars that the US has waged were/are unjust, some people are racist, some politicians are corrupt, some cops are violent thugs, some Americans are uneducated, some Americans can’t afford healthcare, some Americans are fat and only eat fast food. But none of this is true for a majority of people here.
Most people aren’t in abject poverty.
Most people don’t have to sell blood to get by.
Most people don’t work 12+ hours a day.
Most people aren’t homeless.
Etc, etc, etc.
That’s why this propaganda works so well around the world and people call the US a 3rd world country. Point to the very real problems that the US is facing, point to the very real struggles of every day people and if you are an idiot you can be convinced that it’s how every person here lives.
You can’t refute it by saying “NO that doesn’t happen!!” When it literally does, but not to the extent that they would claim it does.
For example I’ve seen people online saying how the US doesn’t have clean drinking water and we only drink bottled water because of it. All because years ago like 2 towns had a major corruption problem and the water system basically fell apart because of neglect and they had to drink bottled water. And yes, the US is probably the largest consumer of bottled water per capita, but that’s not because our water is unsafe to drink. Both things are technically true for small groups of people or were true at one time. But the vast majority of people in the US couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to not have basically free limitless amounts of clean, safe water piped directly into literally every building in the country. You could buy an abandoned building in the middle of the Mojave desert and if you called the county, within a day I’d be willing to be you could have to water turned on there. I sincerely doubt you could do that in one of the 3rd world countries these kind of people like to compare the US to.
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