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Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

The name Hạ Long is derived from the Sino-Vietnamese 下龍, meaning “descending dragon”. According to local legend, when Vietnam had just started to develop into a country, they had to fight against invaders. To assist the Vietnamese in defending their country, the gods sent a family of dragons as protectors. This family of dragons began spitting out jewels and jade. These jewels turned into the islands and islets dotting the bay, linking together to form a great wall against the invaders. Under magics, numerous rock mountains abruptly appeared on the sea, ahead of invaders’ ships; the forward ships struck the rocks and each other. After winning the battle, the dragons were interested in peaceful sightseeing of the Earth, and then decided to live in this bay. (x)

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Hang Son Doong, Vietnam

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Somehow, U.S. journalists are much better at noticing and decoding propaganda in the foreign press than in their own media outlets.

As Adam Johnson pointed out back in August — and as Bailey Stuber discussed on Episode 9 of the podcast — U.S. media outlets love stories like these but usually fail to pursue the bigger questions that these stories raise. Johnson put it this way:

A healthy press would take these anecdotes of “can do” spirit and ask bigger questions, like why are these people forced into such absurd hardship? Who benefits from skyrocketing college costs? Why does the public transit in this person’s city not have subsidies for the poor? Why aren’t employers forced to offer time off for catastrophic accidents? But time and again, the media mindlessly tells the bootstrap human interest story, never questioning the underlying system at work.

But when this kind of story goes viral in China, the New York Times has no trouble immediately discerning that there are in fact two contradictory aspects to this story: first, the propaganda value of this “symbol of the raw determination of rural residents” (as the NYT reporter put it), and second, the “plight of the tens of millions of so-called left-behind children who grow up in impoverished rural areas largely on their own after their parents leave to work in big cities” (again in the words of the NYT reporter).

We don’t get this kind of nuance when it comes to the U.S. versions of these stories. As Johnson and Stuber pointed out, we get two versions of this story: the original version, where some impoverished worker walks ten miles uphill in the snow both ways to work every day, and then the follow-up where the news media congratulates itself for telling this inspiring story by reporting on the groundswell of public support for the impoverished worker, who (thanks to a GoFundMe campaign or a generous anonymous donor) can now afford a car to get to work.

Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but it would be nice if the news operations that run these types of “perseverance porn” (Johnson’s term) stories read the NYT’s China example and realized that their own puff pieces about these diligent, obedient individuals who gratefully schlep to their grueling, underpaid jobs every day are actually part of a larger narrative serving a specific political perspective and propaganda purpose.

#it’s called ethnocentrism #found pretty much everywhere in the world

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this bitch is so dramatic i love him

Hello endless void that is Tumblr. I’m back after a 3 year hiatus, better than ever. I stopped using this app because it’s slightly annoying and depressing. But I hope you all are doing well, and things are going nicely in your lives.

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Rusalochka, Vladimir Bychkov (1976)

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House on Pali Hill Studio Mumbai

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i love dominant men but at the same time if a man tells me what to do i’ll bodyslam him

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Photographer Han Youngsoo witnessed a period of profound transformation in Seoul after the end of the Korean War. See his photos in the ICP gallery at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. http://bit.ly/2raiZxQ 📷 Hoehyeon-dong, Seoul, Korea 1956-1963