This comment was brought to you by the US State Department.
Tell me, how many countries’ governments has China knocked over in the last century as compared to the US CIA?
Comment on Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to Biden, who has already committed to signing it
natural_motions@lemmynsfw.com 2 months agoEh, I’ll take what I can get. The CCP is a far, far worse influence than the US, their global influence should definitely be restricted wherever possible until the regime changes.
senseamidmadness@beehaw.org 2 months ago
natural_motions@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
Oh, whoops, you thought I was defending the US. Not what I said, but it’s the only way you can deflect from what the Chinese government is.
China being economically destitute for the last century thanks to terrible CCP domestic policies doesn’t somehow change the fact that they represent an even darker path forward for humanity than the US. It’s not really a point that can be argued. China has hundreds of concentration camps, forced mass relocation of Tibetans and other minorities to place them in dormitories they literally can’t leave except during work hours, a national information firewall to control everything their populace sees.
Like, Xi Xinping had fucking execution vans in his lead up to power. Your brain would have to be scrubbed bloody to think China and the US represent the same thing.
senseamidmadness@beehaw.org 2 months ago
The history speaks for itself. China is less of a threat to other countries in the world than the USA is. Your idea that they’re some international boogeyman that’s going to take over the entire world and doom humanity is just you repeating “China bad and scary” State Department propaganda.
Even with China’s human rights record being what it is, they don’t export war across the entire world.
natural_motions@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
Who said anything about physically taking over the world? Like, yes, obviously China has imperial ambitions to expand their borders (limited only by the wests hegemony and the now undermined and faltering rules-based order) but that’s not the influence I’m talking about. I’m talking about the normalization of anti-democracy and the technologically driven hyper-fascist state. The more power and influence China gets, the more fascism thrives wherever it has roots.
North Korea also hasn’t been able to bomb a bunch of countries either, that doesn’t mean anyone but an idiot would argue they should be given more influence.
trevron@beehaw.org 2 months ago
Lets drop this whole “lesser of two evils” thing. It doesn’t work in our two party system and it certainly doesnt work with comparing governments. Fascism is fascism. America loves having a boogeyman.
The united states is fascist as fuck. All our tax dollars are funneled into the war machine to ruin lives all around the world to help make a few dick heads rich. We fund far right monsters in order to overthrow democracies and peaceful governments that don’t want to fuck with America’s banks. Civil liberties are thrown out week after week. The wage gap is a fucking joke. Nobody can afford shit. Homelessness is on the rise. Schools are underfunded. Police are militarized against the citizens. Protesting is becoming illegal basically everywhere. We allow corporations to run slave operations all over the global south in order to placate and distract consumers from their shitty existences.
It is only getting worse. And the big reason they want to get rid of tiktok is because ordinary people are successfully sharing their firsthand experiences with fascist america. Its got nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with control. Young people are mad and organizing on the only platform that doesn’t have a US backdoor.
natural_motions@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
I like how you pretend people weren’t sharing their experiences and politics on the million other forms of social media that exist before TikTok. As if everyone was in the dark ages. I’ve seen all the ugly things happening in the US and I don’t use chinese spyware.
China is not just a “boogie man”, it’s literally a technofascist state that tightly controls all information coming into, out of and circulating within its country. It disappears a million Uyghurs into hundreds of concentration camps and its own population is literally the only one on earth that doesn’t realize its happened. The brutalization of peaceful Hong Kong protestors was broadcast around the world and yet mainland chinese still think it was some violent uprising. People there don’t even know the truth about Tinanmen or Tibet.
But somehow that’s all a gap in your knowledge of the world…hmmm, weird must just be a coincidence that the dude who gets all his info from TikTok doesn’t understand that China has the most developed censorship and social engineering apparatus on the planet…surely they suddenly give all that up when operating TikTok in the west.
trevron@beehaw.org 2 months ago
I accidentally deleted my last response when trying to put in an edit but it doesn’t really matter. You are arguing in bad faith and it is clear you don’t want reason. So I will leave you with this:
Fascism can exist in more than one place. I am aware that the US got its current citizen control playbook from the CCP. I am not defending china. But if all it takes for them to threaten our national security is to let people know the proper truth about america, then I ought to let them do it anyways. The primary difference between tiktok and the other SoMe platforms is largely that american billionaires and israeli special interest groups have no influence there. So important matters that affect the working class (anyone whos not rich) are less likely to be controlled and manipulated. Therefore, it is more likely for regular people to get real information/news straight from the source/people. It’s not that difficult to understand.
natural_motions@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
And it can take a far more dangerous and intractable form in one place compared to another.
You are vastly, vastly understating the degree of fascist control in China, you’d have to in order to try and even begin to try and compare the US and China. You may as well try to claim that downloading Russian spyware gives you better info on the US affairs because they’re our adversary as well so they must be a better source of information than anything in the US, it makes no sense.
China has a pointed interest in deceiving you, they do not have any interest in ensuring you have accurate information about the US and its history, you’re foolish to believe that they would.
There is no true information about the US on TikTok that is not available to me outside of China’s information ecosystem. Yes, you’re not going to get reliable information from corporate media or far-right outlets, but that has not stopped me from learning about the black spots in American history. In fact I was taught many of those black spots in American schools. Go ask a person in China what actually happened in Tienanmen or in Hong Kong, or Tibet or what is happening to the Uyghurs as we speak.
Here’s the difference that you are keen to ignore; The US information ecosystem is not a monolith. It’s why I can go and find sources that are reporting accurately about events in Palentine, or the protests on Columbia campuses. It’s why I learned about the Trail of Tears, the Tulsa Massacre, or The Battle of Blair Mountain in school, why I can find that kind of information freely on the Internet.
By contrast, the Chinese information ecosystem is a monolith, by design. It is built so that the state has control over all information and can censor at will. They are far ahead of the US in this regard, and when you carry water for the CCP by equating them to the US, claiming they’re better or “just as bad” you are pushing us further into fascism, not out of it.
Thevenin@beehaw.org 2 months ago
I think it is deeply unwise to take that to heart.
I grew up deep in the American Midwest, surrounded by Evangelical-leaning Christian fundamentalism. Out there, committing one sin was considered as bad as committing a hundred (see also: Matt 5, James 2:10). They dropped the whole “lesser of two evils” thing, and you know what happened? They treated gays the same way they treated murderers, because the two sins were equally easy to condemn. They put rapists in pulpits because in their eyes, molesting a child was just as easy to forgive as ogling an adult.
When you tell people to reject nuance in ethics, that there is no “greater evil,” you remove 90% of their moral compass. They become pliable and easily manipulated by whoever can seize power or respect (see also: Trump).
Every person has flaws, and every system, government, or ideology created by people is likewise flawed. If we refuse to judge the severity of those flaws, refuse acknowledge that there are lesser evils in government, then we claim our own ideologies are no better than fascism – after all, both have their sins, and we just claimed that all sins are equal.