I have mentioned this before about the US and Chinese propaganda wars. Decades old wrestling but the real winner of this is the US. The US will take a grainy satellite image and attach a story to it. If you analyse the image directly, it shows nothing at all. Just indistinct buildings that you can barely make out. No detail. Yet that is the brilliance of it. The less you see the more you believe. Take Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, some of the most powerful scenes are mostly featureless. When HAL and Dave the astronaut are having their conversation where HAL won’t let Dave out of the air lock the scene is paired back. Most of the audience’s job is believing it is real.

There is only the red light of HAL and Dave’s face cutting between the conversation. The real clincher is that your imagination fully kicks in. The Chinese though use real body cam footage and real events, sometimes with gory detail. The problem with this approach is the shock of it makes it less believable. You go into denial almost straightaway. Maybe this is a cultural thing in that in your daily life you don’t see this kind of stuff going on and you protect yourself from the fear it would induce. Nobody for example wants to believe a minor misunderstanding could lead to a shooting death at the hands of authorities.

Another unrelated topic but I have to dwell on it for a moment is the premise that nobody really has money. That in itself is an observation in how you come across bad payers. Bad payers can be from any walk of life. Like someone can have a decadent party, they have money yes but really they don’t have it when it is really needed. Like you do a job for someone they got high, they got drunk but suddenly when the bill arrives for something important they cry poor. A lot of people say it is just the character of someone, like they are just all over the place and possibly a scumbag at heart.

Yet I want to say if you consider debt in society you could say even the wealthiest families are up to their eyeballs in debt. The bigger maintenance bills, the larger the ‘operation’ the money really is stretched. I remember my sister explaining that some of the biggest homes on her street were more about intergenerational debt than wealth. These homes are about the size of a football field, with a one hundred metre run up just to the front door. Lots of manicured trees, stupid looking cars, it might as well be an aircraft hangar. Pointless waste of space. Yet in China they built this new park in Chengdu. It was so big that they decided to use parts of it to grow food for the locals. I find it hard to believe people want a front garden that is so big which does nothing at all.