Redditors react to a video of a bike ride around Pyongyang

Video: the most normal city ever filmed

Redditors: So spooky! Everything looks… wrong! This guy is taking his life in his hands to film this! avgn-horror

Also Redditors: Looks too normal, this has to be staged, they’re actors and this is a propaganda channel! phoenix-objection-1phoenix-objection-1


Side note: my tolerance for western bullshit on the DPRK has reached the negatives, five seconds in these comments and you can cook an egg with my blood. Salute to the small handful of brave comrades pushing back on propaganda in the replies kim-salute

  • KhanCipher [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    America is the country where if you don’t have way too much food on your store shelves then people will not shop at your grocery store.

    Which is a real observable behavior you see in americans, in part because (for example) if there’s only a couple tomatoes left in a case that holds 30+ it’s become a sorta cultural natural reaction to think that there must be something wrong with them regardless of their actual condition. Which considering how often scam artists were and still are a thing here in the states and the general distrust of government institutions, it’s not surprising one bit why you see this behavior happen frequently here.

    Edit: I’m not sure why exactly this behavior exists, but that’s what makes the most sense to me. And that i know my grandmother has this ingrained in her and she was born in the 50s, but that doesn’t quite make sense as she was influenced by the waste nothing attitude from her parents who grew up in the great depression.

    • Sinistar [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      It’s related to a common bit of culture shock that occurred whenever Soviets visited America. In the USSR grocery stores would stock goods according to the population of an area, and put out about as much product as they expected to sell that day, leading to far less waste but also making them vulnerable to supply shocks and teaching everybody that if you wanted the best cut of meat you had to plan to be there when it was delivered. People with that mentality seeing overstocked US shelves for the first time naturally thought it was wild, including government higher ups who had access to private grocery stores as a privilege of their rank in the party.

      This is often spun in Western media as an exclusively communist thing, an indicator of how everything in the soviet world was scarce and rationed, but it’s a bit of culture shock that people from just about every non-Western country has when encountering Western excess for the first time - hell, even in modern day Europe the grocery stores are a lot more modest than American ones, simply because their culture hasn’t embraced the excess to the same degrees as ours has.

      I’m sure it’s ingrained in me too just as much as everyone else, even though I think the more rational way to run a grocery store is the one that reduces waste while still ensuring ample access to food (insert FBI study on American vs Soviet calories and nutrition here). tldr brainworms