Mencius Moldbugman

I have been enjoying this book by Tom Carter: An American Bum in China. It’s the true-life story of an American autist who moved to China in an attempt to get laid but who ended up jailed, homeless and broke.pic.twitter.com/ZO551gpzvB

The whole thing is written and illustrated in the style of an old-fashioned chapbook. Look how lovely the protagonist looks while getting arrested by Chinese police: positively homely.pic.twitter.com/hEXZN9EgNi

The “hero” hails from the town of Muscatine, Iowa. In an ironic twist, Muscatine is where Xi Jinping stayed when he lived in the US during his youth as part of an agricultural committee It’s full of meth addicts & shuttered shop windows. Xi calls it the “real America”. Go figurepic.twitter.com/rRg8qJ6W4m

Without giving away the plot, the guy makes a series of bad decisions which lead to scenes like this where he is sleeping in an ATM box. Eventually he illegally crosses the China-Burma border in an ill-judged attempt to sell his US passport. Apparently they fetch up to 15k.pic.twitter.com/K3pZKu7fqu

The book does a good job at using this story to highlight US-China relations in general and how much the prospects of American youth have fallen in comparison to China’s. I’m sure most of my based followers here will have their own theories how that became so.pic.twitter.com/lUn8EUMITn

There are some great Boomerish comments on that review too. This one gotta be my favourite. “Why don’t these kids just find a job in a Chinese factory?”pic.twitter.com/lmJ1vYkGyp

There are thankfully some better comments. I especially liked this quote by R Tsukazaki: “Lonely, unnecessary men with no marketable skills are not in short supply among American millennials.”pic.twitter.com/X3M76dVzfc