in my limited experience, many people in these places growing up and being educated by this infrastructure struggle to grasp how fucked and adversarial it is elsewhere. “it can’t be that bad” etc and generally think their own government is exaggerating how bad it is… if they’re even aware of things like the exceptional carceral apparatus, uneven development/education access, or abysmal/expensive healthcare. i mean, the UK is practically a dystopia already and even when the chapos were canvassing for corbyn and countering the lib narratives around cutting NHS, randos on the street couldn’t fathom how much an ambulance ride costs in the US or how anything could function that way. “there would be riots!” no, baby, there would not. there might be a protest, and then they’d fire a volley into the crowd or just run people over with SUVs and lock up/brutalize/gas the witnesses, the media would characterize it as something else entirely, and that would be all she wrote. message received.

when people of AES do meet western/Norteamericanos travelers, they meet the wealthy/affluent ones who are buffered against the worst of it and have the brain worms to match their lives of luxury, and this can counter the narratives that the west is fucked… because they met a “real” person who owned their own business (family wealth management/landlord, bourgeoisie) and describes themselves as working class anyway.

i remember telling this young cuban guy–after he told me their government expected two years of public service–that the US expected 10 years + 10% of your pay during those 10 years, and he was blown away. especially when i told him how much i made for having a graduate degree with a “good” job vs how much went to shitty housing, health insurance, etc.

Gonna have to move to an aes state for that friend.

China has high speed trains and they seem happy about it.

I too would like to visit Cuba

Must be good compared to places where people behave like chimps with machine guns, like where I live.