Yeah, I’ve been all over China, urban and rural. Constitutional right, hilarious. There is a shit ton of poverty, countless people living in shacks. One time I was also there as an alley was literally being bulldozed to ‘cleanse’ it of homeless people for the upcoming Olympics.

I’ve been to Moscow, but I didn’t go all Tucker Carlson over it. It’s a large city that’s mostly bleak, like many other cities I’ve seen across former Soviet states, and I’ve seen plenty of them. In one regard it stood out to me, and that is in how miserable the people seem to be. Dour and without exuberance. If I could think of an opposite-world to Latin American culture, Moscow would be it, and it’s by far the most prosperous region in the vast Russian Empire.

As for speaking to the locals, yeah, I’ve tried to have conversations eliciting their opinions about their lives, not only in Russia and China, but also in Cuba, and many hundreds of times in the Gulf Arab states because I spent so much time there, and I know that look on a human face oh-so-well when they want to say something out loud but they know how dangerous it would be, so they shoo it away and you’re left only with a sad and demure smile. I’ve definitely had those conversations in your paradises countless times.

Stop with your immature romanticizing. There is no utopia, not in the West, not in China, not on Earth. Stop dreaming of heaven like some religious automaton. We’re nothing more than bipedal apes and we’ve just got to make our own communities as good as we can make them. Kill your heroes already.