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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

The BBC did their own version of this in 2008 called Blood Sweat and T Shirts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood,_Sweat_and_T-shirts

The gimmick was that most of the kids were ludicrous pampered upper middle class fashion students with no sense of perspective, or at least the programme was edited to portray them as such. Much of the entertainment came from watching them subjected to backbreaking labor while their self-contained worldviews crumbled around them.

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The problem with the gimmick is that it's intellectually dishonest when it comes to making the strongly implied point. Hand picked young people forced into any difficult labor, even in high payed rewarding first-world careers, would probably react in mostly the same way (especially with the benefit of film editing) as they would in a third world sweatshop.

You can see young people crying on "reality" TV when all they have to do is be alive in a house when everything is provided for them.

Of course I'm not defending the conditions in sweat shops or saying they're not awful, it's just that you can get a (selected) pampered upper middle class young person to cry on television about nearly anything.

They had to go all way to Asia for this? How about bricklaying jobs in eastern europe? How about factory workers in any country?

Really, we all know life is not fair, but to go all way there to just cry and moan seems rude

I feel this point. I'd argue that these kids are rich even for Norwegian standards. You don't need a plane to see some stark contrasts. Just take tram 61 from Musikerviertel to Tannenbusch.[1]

1: A local (to me) tram line that leads from an expensive inner-city region to an affordable ghetto in under ten minutes. If you are born there (Tannenbusch) chances are you will spent most of your time there. If on the other hand, you are in Bonn to study at the local university, you probably don't know it exists.

My kids love Show Me What You're Made Of on CBBC (BBC channel for school-kids aged 6-12)

> "Five children travel across the world to live and work alongside the people who make the everyday items they take for granted."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/shows/show-me-what-youre-made-of

The Danish version had the same angle.

They where terrible at the sweatshop work, but wouldn't admit it. One of them ended up stealing food from the film crew.

What was the Danish version called? I don't recall hearing about it

Blod, Sved og T-shirts http://www.dr.dk/Undervisning/Gymnasium/Samfund/Oekonomi/Glo...

I think it is besides the point that they were pampered upper middle class kids. The things they saw were horrible. In the danish edition, they went to India where there was a whole town build up around a mountain of trash. The folks there would drink black water from the mountain.

I think a dose of reality is what most middle class kids need. Otherwise many of them grow into arrogant right wing adults with no real clue about how much of the world works.

Downvoted by some middle class kids! :)

I suspect your inclusion of "right wing" probably derailed your comment - particularly as self-proclaimed "left wing" people can be just as arrogant and out of touch as their "right wing" counterparts.

"But they just need to work harder."

You don't often hear that from left wing people.

You do hear it a lot from right wing UK politicians.

Well, you don't hear that too often from right wing people, either. (Except caricatures, perhaps built by left wing people).

(Yes, there are similar or mirror caricatures built by right wing people about left wing people. However, even as a right wing person, I might admit that not everyone in the left wing is Pol Pot).

To show how silly the "right wing" vs "left wing" split can be, the UK under the government of Mrs Thatcher ("right wing") gave military assistance to the Khmer Rouge ("left wing") - presumably as the latter were the enemies of the Vietnamese ("left wing").

Well, not necessary silly, but it is not the only dimension on which people and nations might align themselves. Being left-wing or right-wing are not enough to define any person or movement thoroughly. The supposition that a right-wing government could never support a left-wing movement in another country is refusing to understand any orthogonal things exist.

For instance, I consider myself right-wing by local standards, but when looking at how things go in Turkey, if I must choose a party to support, I would pick the one that's a member of Socialist International. Still, I think that does not make right-left split totally silly.

Thinking in terms of wings is stupid. There are people on our very own hn who think that way though https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8990458

"Blod, sved og t-shirts"

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