01/22/24 - Born like weeds, die like weeds. That’s the common fate of the bottom class.
A compilation of comments about the fire at the private primary school that happened a few days ago:
“Any families with money and power in that town send their kids to tutoring classes in the big city on the weekends. Or buy a house in the city and take their kids to a school district there. All those kids burned to death didn’t even have the right to participate in involution.”
“Injustice for one person is a threat against all—Montesquieu. This is the most impactful quote I’ve read all of 2023. The logic of the system can be used against everyone.”
“I’ve got government worker families in my town who send their kids to boarding school from kindergarten to “toughen them up”.”
“A lot of people say that urban/rural segregation is so severe nowadays that rural kids have lower IQ than city kids in general. I don’t even know if education is helping with that or worseningi t.”
“And yet, the New Year is still going on. Nobody cares.”
“They’re the most bottom class of people. What family wouldn’t love on a pair of twins and want to spend every day with them? Who would put them in a boarding school and only see them twice a month?”
“They don’t even get to go to public school, because you have to pay a fee to get into public school, and your parents have to take you there and take you home every day.”
“I was born in the 80s in a small town in Henan, and when I went to middle school, we put an entire class’s worth of kids in a collective dorm room. I can’t imagine that 20 years later, we’re still doing that shit.”
“With the demand on stability, this incident will vanish into silence too, drowned by the harmonious New Year spirit. A bunch of rulers will still dance and drink and no one will be held responsible for these families. Shame about the kids.”
“I started boarding in middle school too, and I missed home and missed my parents every day. I thought I had it bad enough, and then I heard that the private school next town over has kids boarding from primary school. They’re the ones that are really pitiable. Our dorm room doesn’t hold 14 people. It’s got maybe 22 people in it all sleeping in piles on the floor. The only good thing about it is that we had a big window.”
“Dogs always know who’s feeding them. Henan media has no spine anymore.”
“Even so, when these kids get into society, they’ll still feel grateful to these people who tortured them. That’s what sad about it!”
“Born like weeds, die like weeds. That’s the common fate of the bottom class. Who would care?”
“I’ve never suffered like this. Back in my day, when I got off of school, I just whiled my days away with cartoons, hide and seek, arcades, and wuxia novels. I don’t want kids. I don’t want him to still be in study periods at 9PM. Grades don’t matter. So what if you get full marks? Will he even get to survive?”
“I just want to know, before their kids died, how many parents praised China’s development every day?”
“If nobody dies, nobody cares. If someone did die, well, so what?”
“It’s so true. Gymnasiums collapse. Dorm rooms burn. The next day, furious trending hashtags cover the internet. And today, all the wailing has been silenced.”
“I wanted to pretend to be blind, because all I can see every time I open my eyes is helplessness. On this god-forsaken land, everyone is a survivor of their times. People born after the 80s have to survive being aborted while in the womb, avoid being abandoned or drowned after being born, avoid being misdiagnosed by village doctors once they’re a bit older, until they’re grown up and still need to dodge danger and malice every day. These needle-sharp words have pricked open the sores of the world, and in the pus and blood is everyone’s fate.”
“A lot of girls really know nothing about childbirth. I just had some commenters argue with me about my friend having a kid.
They ask, the whole thing cost 300,000 RMB and yet she wasn’t willing to pay for an epidural?
Look, an epidural doesn’t actually mean that it doesn’t hurt. Everyone’s got a different tolerance for drugs, and the epidural only helps while you’re in labour. It’s still painful well after delivery if you tear. My friend had a second degree tear, and it took her a month to be able to get out of bed and stand for 10 minutes.
They say that she must’ve went to a bad hospital to have such severe tearing.
I haven’t had kids myself, and even I know that this has nothing to do with the hospital. It’s about you as the expecting mother. My friend is a very disciplined person, and she told me that girls who don’t tear are the lucky ones. 95% of deliveries result in tearing.
So, please, girls, educate yourself about childbirth! This has to do with your body, after all! Whether or not you’ll end up needing it, you should know either way.”
Comments say, “They’re just jealous. I am curious, though, your friend seems to have recovered really quickly after childbirth. Did she get a C-section?”
“I’m expecting, and I’ve never came in contact with information about childbirth before. But the first three months of pregnancy, my stomach would hurt like I was getting period cramps. The doctor said it was all normal T_T”
“I’m a midwife at a top-rank women and children’s hospital. You can ask me anything you want to know about how delivery tends to go, but my advice is to just not have children.”
A tiktok video of a priest slapping a 1-year-old during a baptism because she won’t stop crying.
[This video’s been taken off by youtube for violating community guidelines, for depicting violence against children. Which is, um, true. I can describe what goes on in it, though, where a baby looks to be kind of scared of a very old French priest and cries the whole time through him chanting and drawing a cross on her forehead. The priest tries to comfort her by shushing her and holding her head to his shoulders, but this only freaks the baby out more. As she gets more shrill and desperate, the priest slaps her in the face and says something very curt. I don’t speak French, so I have no idea what it means.
The parents visibly jump and look at each other in shock, while a woman on the other side of the altar goes to pull the priest back. You can hear a commotion go through the crowd too. The priest goes back to trying to hug the baby, who is well and truly freaking out now, and her father steps forward and yanks her out of the priest’s hands. And that’s where the video ends.]
Comments say, “This old fart looks like a paedophile, blech.”
“Is the beardy guy the dad? I feel like he can’t control his urge to punch the old bastard anymore.”
“Why the hell do they keep believing in this bullshit?”
“The whole internet’s arguing about bride price again. From my point of view, this is basically just a twisted up bit of logic as we transition between old and new forms of marriage. The twisted up bit is that we never properly defined a problem:
Does marriage count as a form of work?
In ancient days, marriage had nothing to do with love. It was purely an alliance for profit. And in most cases, it’s not even personal profit, but the profit of two entire families. This is true for just about every culture in the world—that’s why weddings are such a big deal in every civilisation. Because the more you celebrate a marriage, the harder it is to take it back. Basically, whether it’s putting together a ridiculous wedding or paying a lot of bride price up front, it’s just putting someone through the wringer, to make them reluctant to divorce, because they could never afford to do this again. They’re out of money and out of face.
For the new couple, this is just a partnership, like opening a company together. It’s great if you happen to like each other, but it’s not a big deal if you don’t either. You just need to do your part in this marriage and enjoy your dividends and don’t embezzle, and you’re good enough. And as for whether or not your partner goes out and gets some drinks after work and flirts with other people, what’s wrong with that? Who doesn’t have some way to relax after work? And the east and west have evolved different forms of “relaxation”. For the east, it’s prostitutes and concubines (of course, this is very bad for women). Western marriages were a bit more equal, in that both men and women fucked around. Louis XV even got made fun of because his wife was too loyal. Thankfully, at least he worked hard and got himself plenty of mistresses until he shook off the shame. And not only did his Queen tolerate it, she honestly encouraged it. After all, for a noble lady who’s already had a dozen children, living a couple years longer and doing less work is much more valuable than a vague sense of “loyalty” from your husband.
In this kind of relationship, a bride price (or any other form of transfer of funds) is basically a signing fee, a payment upfront of profit. It’s the price you pay to form a relationship with this person. If you don’t pay it, they won’t sign the contract. In most cases, it goes from the man to the woman, because women will actually face death when they have kids. It’s not unfair to say that they deserve extra compensation. Forget ancient times, even in the modern day, divorced women find it harder to enter into a new relationship than divorced men, so they’re already punished more for breaking their contract. Of course there’s exceptions, but these exceptions are usually a result of other reasons. For example, if a woman wants desperately to marry a very high-status man, in order to elevate or ensure her and her family’s power and status. Like, in Indian marriage, if a lower caste woman wants to marry a higher caste man, she needs to pay three times dowry, but that’s not necessary for marrying a man of her own caste. Western history has some women from awkward backgrounds, like the bastards of the Pope or Kings who need to launder their background by marrying a noble husband, so they have to pay a ton of dowry.
In this situation, bride price is very effective as a way of ensuring cooperation from both sides. This is basically the same thing as a sign-on bonus when you get hired to work somewhere. There’s nothing morally questionable about it. Even if you demand a sign on bonus and they’re not willing to agree to it so you lose the job offer, that’s not a big deal. Like, you can demand a 2 million RMB sign on bonus from your company, and at most, your company can say no and then make fun of you around the office. But in no world would it be illegal. Basically, in this context, marriage is like a job, or starting a business, it’s about productivity. There’s nothing wrong with laying out your terms before you enter into a contract. Not talking it out would be considered weirder—like not asking about pay when getting a new job.
But all of this has an important pretext—these partnerships don’t get dissolved except in the case of death. Who would pay that much money up front for a contract that might be voided at any time?
When we come to the 20th century, especially after the 60s, everyone started to come to believe that the basis of marriage should be love. You should love someone to a certain degree before marrying them. This has changed marriage from a working relationship to a consuming relationship, and the product that people are consuming is love. In this context, the ideal marriage should be two people giving each other emotional value nonstop, cuddling, flirting, being all gooey and sweet…
Oh, of course, in this context, divorce is pretty free too. After all, you’d only marry someone if you loved them. And if you didn’t love them anymore, of course you’d leave. So in a lot of TV shows made in the 80s and 90s, mistresses weren’t a bad guy at all. You’d even get classic lines like, “A loveless marriage is immoral.” Or, “The one who isn’t loved is the mistress.” If the legitimacy of a marriage is built on love, then of course loveless marriages are illegitimate.
In this context, of course bride price wouldn’t be appropriate. We’re talking about love here, how can you bring up money? Not to mention, even from the point of view of profit, if you can leave any time, then who would pay that much money up front to maintain this relationship? What if it didn’t work out? Wouldn’t all that money go to waste then?
But no matter how much you love each other, you can’t change the fact that a ton of work goes into a marriage. You’ve got to raise children, right? You’ve got to take care of old people. You’ve got to take care of your spouse when they get sick. You’ve got to furnish a house and clean and cook food. Even if you hire a maid, someone has to interview them and assign them work, right? Not to mention keeping up with connections and socialisation.
This work doesn’t disappear just because you love each other. Cleaning a house top to bottom is the same amount of work whether you love your spouse or not. You can avoid defining marriage as “work”, but that doesn’t mean the work disappears.
So although everyone says that the basis for marriage should be love, no country actually mentions love at all when it comes to marital laws, but instead follow the principles of dividing profits like in the old context. For example, alimony in the west is a lot like compensation for signing a non-compete clause. Like if your wife has to quit her career in order to have a child and do childcare for you, then you have to pay her back for that if you get a divorce, and keep paying money to maintain their standard of living until your wife finds a new job that makes roughly the same amount of money or remarries again.
With this system, to some extent, marriage is still a type of work, to the point where the government has put out protective policies. If it’s work, then it’s alright for me to mail out thousands of resumes, right? And I can interview for new jobs while at my current one, right? And I can talk with other people in the same industry about their income and benefits, right? I can switch jobs, right? I can ask for raises, right? What do you care about when you look for a new job? The pay and the benefits, of course. How many people really work out of passion for the job itself? We all work because we don’t have money.
Since you have to put in work, why should you not ask for pay just because you “love” this person?
Of course, that’s how the west does things. China doesn’t have an alimony system, but this risk doesn’t go away. So Chinese women have chosen to front-load all the risk. Pay bride price first, or buy a house first, and then jump through a bunch of hoops about buying them gifts, to pick out men who are capable of paying up and willing to pay up. Of course there’s still risk, but it’s better than not filtering men at all, right?
But the government definitely can’t encourage people to think of marriage like a job. And yet, work and risk still exist in a marriage. That doesn’t go away just because you’ve plastered a bunch of slogans everywhere. What can you do about it?
Here, China’s decided to rely on the free market. Talk it out yourself. As for how you talk it out, what you talk about, and what the final terms are, that’s your own business. I’m not going to get involved, so I have no responsibility. If you get a one million bride price, good for you. If you get a negative one million bride price, good for you. If it works out, it works out. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. It’s not like the government gets any commission out of this. It’s none of their business.
And if you’ve done business, you know how hard people work when they’re fighting for their own profit.”
Comments say, “But I think the government’s trying to cancel bride price right now.”
“Just curious, please don’t flame me, if you get paid bride price, do people think you should have to pay tax on it?”
“So should child-free couples not have to pay bride price then?”
A tiktok video of the moment colour was introduced to television in various countries:
Comments say, “The Australian skit is so cute!”
“Of course France is the boring one.”
“They fucked up on the timing with the German one XD”
“They all picked red for the first colour. Guess it is the most immediately visible colour after all.”
“There’s an unspoken rule in anime circles.
You can make fun of, taunt, ridicule, or even outright insult otakus all you like, and it’s no problem, but there’s two bright red lines you can never cross: 1. People’s waifus. 2. People’s porn.
And Somebody is a visceral case of the second example.
According to rumours, Somebody suddenly put up a bunch of videos accusing Little Red Car. I think it’s because he took money from a competitor, but that’s just rumours. I’ve got no proof. Whether he took money or not, his videos worked. LRC banned Chinese IPs.
And the result is, he’s went from a well-respected anime guru to a rat that everyone wants to kill.
When he first started accusing LRC, although he lost a bunch of fans, most of the comments were still mostly just making fun of him. But after LRC really banned Chinese IPs, his comment section instantly turned into nothing but blames, curses directed at female members of his family, questioning his biological origins. I predicted that he’d be the next LexBurner [guy who got Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation banned on the Chinese internet], but I guess my prediction was still too conservative. LexBurner’s went back to making videos now, and he’s still pretty popular. And yet Somebody has completely given up under the barrage of assault and the last update he has made is March of last year. He’ll probably disappear forever now, because everyone remembers what he did.
Over a decade of work, ruined overnight because of one dumb decision, and he’ll probably never be able to come back again. Even if he got paid a fortune for that one video, was it really worth it?
Remember, everyone, don’t fuck with porn sites.”
Comments say, “My power level is nowhere high enough to understand this post.”
“Although I have no idea what you’re talking about, it is true that if it weren’t some fans fucking around and getting AO3 banned, a certain celebrity wouldn’t be nearly as universally hated as he is.”
“What the fuck as Director Ao done now.”