To be clear, I think the homes being made fun of in the original picture were supposed to be Western homes. They certainly look like many subdivisions in the US.
I haven’t actually seen propaganda about Soviet housing. The pictures you posted just look like the poorer areas of any western city. We stayed in La Mina (on accident) when we visited Barcelona. Your pictures look better than La Mina!
I don’t know about Tokyo or what the options really are for raising kids in Japan. But I think (I’ll join you here with spewing opinion/ conjecture everywhere) in the US a lot of people intentionally leave cities once they decide to have kids. When you are a young professional in your 20s, it’s still very popular to live in dense urban centers, but then as you get married and start having kids, the vast majority of people move out to the suburbs or more rural areas. Now, obviously this is a privileged class of people, and maybe there are different trends in socioeconomic classes above and below them. And perhaps they move out of the city for other reasons (the price of housing, the quality of schools, etc), but I think access to nature also plays a part. But I say this as a girl scout troop leader, so I’m definitely biased.
On the one hand, I guess it’s a more efficient packing of people into urban areas than having large green spaces. On the other hand, it’s fucking depressing, and I think kids miss something in childhood without psuedo wild spaces to go explore alone.
What do you think the drones are for?
I don’t see why we have to contrast the US and China so that one is a good guy and one is a bad guy. Has the US exploited the rest of the world since WWII for our own financial interests? Yes. Do we have an increasingly authoritarian government seeking to eventually crush internal dissent? Yes.
None of that makes China good.
If you don’t want to talk about Tiananmen Square, talk about China forcefully relocated migrant workers ahead of the Olympics in 2008. Talk about China sending Uyghurs to reeducation camps and forcefully sterilizing some of them. Talk about how China forced women to abandon/ abort babies for 30 years throughout vast swaths of their country. Talk about how people residing in China can’t actually talk about any of these things, to the point where citizens of Hong Kong fought back with violent protests and many fled to resist their encroaching authoritarian hand.
Did China raise more than a billion people out of brutal poverty in a single generation, and was it one of the most impressive and important developments of the last century? Yes, absolutely. Is an authoritarian technocracy better able to deal with the issues facing humanity in the near future like climate change? Potentially.
That doesn’t mean China’s citizens enjoy civil liberties.
The US is lying through their teeth about Iran, but Iran is hardly a communist government. They’re a theocratic authoritarian regime. There is no diversification of power in their government. Roles and responsibilities may be delegated out, but ultimate authority rests with the Ayatollah.