"From Chips to Security, China Is Getting Much of What It Wants From the U.S." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/world/asia/nvidia-china-t...
Now, you could argue that the subsequent invasion of Iraq was counterproductive to that, but I don't see that argument having water.
1) eliminating a military threat to Saudi Arabia and Israel
2) placing hundreds of military outposts on Iran's doorstep
3) destabilizing Iran and Syria by empowering militant groups dormant under Saddam to re-arm and try to establish a Caliphate in Syria.
4) awarding trillions in no-bid contracts to Dick Cheney's Halliburton and a slew of arms manufacturers and private military contractors who could operate free of the burdensome rules of the Geneva Conventions. Halliburton received so much business that they moved their HQ to Dubai.
There's a lot more evidence and reason to believe that the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 because the Bush Administration realized that, despite their initial inclinations, they couldn't sell a war on Iraq as a response to 9/11 without first making a visible effort that was more tangibly connected to the organization that actually carried out the attacks.
I think Xi Jinping and his CPC wish to inflict a Century of Humiliation on the West, or at least on the members of the Eight-Nation Alliance. Russia and Hungary, beware.
Unfortunately this game only takes one willing participant. We'd better get our heads in the game and begin to play. And we need to prepare for a proper hot war, too, although that's already well understood and those preparations are already well underway.
Yet you provide none.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/6416/afghanistans-opium-p...
Your link to some stats on levels of poppy production does not support your conspiracy theory.
But there has been a meme in China for ages that Trump is secretly a Chinese guy named “Chuan Jianguo” (Jianguo means “building the nation”) who was sent by China to destroy America from within.
Although answer is probably simplest - for himself and his ego.
I cant imagine the mental gymnastic any half decent republican must be going through daily to keep avoiding utter debiliating shame for voting him when doing the proverbial look in the mirror.
Why?
If you want your country to fail because you don't like the president, that's terrible.
I feel stuck under Starmer but I don't want his policies to fail the country in order to prove my position correct!
This whole notion where “half the country voted for this guy!” Is a tired and inaccurate trope.
Which makes it a lot more than half the country.
You really believe that? If you don’t vote you’re not an active citizen?
I have no words.
Was a stupid fucking take.
“Half the country voted for X” isn’t accurate math. People just excuse away hard, hard logical facts and it makes me pretty fucking mad.
We are talking here about people who chose not to vote.
Strictly, yes your cousin is a passive citizen. But no sane human will call them out on that because obviously they had bo other choice.
Exactly which president in the past 100 years are you referring to? I can come up a list if you’re not sure who was elected before Clinton.
Or maybe just the less of 2 evils. An intelligent asshat or non asshat that was an imbecile. It was time for a change.
There are so many things I don’t like about him but some of his policies such as immigration / border enforcement, natural resource utilization, federal workforce reduction, regulatory reduction and tariffs are absolutely legit imho and will take time to have an affect.
Why is he not in jail right now for the most obviously transparent bribery scheme in the history of US politics!?
Why is nobody screaming about this?
The New York Times has reported extensively on Justice Clarence Thomas’s acceptance of luxury travel, real estate transactions, and other gifts from Texas billionaire and GOP donor Harlan Crow.
A whistleblower complaint filed by Kendal B. Price, a former colleague of Jane Roberts at Major, Lindsey & Africa, revealed that she earned approximately $10.3 million in commissions between 2007 and 2014 for placing lawyers at top firms. [1]
The Times reported that Justice Samuel Alito has faced ethics questions related to his relationship with conservative donors and political allies. Although his 2025 disclosures claimed that he received no gifts during the previous year, prior reporting noted that he had accepted luxury travel and accommodations paid for by wealthy individuals with interests before the Court. He has defended such trips as falling within disclosure exemptions.
Justice Neil Gorsuch was the subject of a New York Times story in late 2024 that addressed his connections to billionaire Philip Anschutz, who helped steer him toward his earlier legal and judicial appointments.
[1] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/wife-of-chief-justic...
Probably because this is the least of our worries comparatively.
I like your implication that Trump is not an ass hat here instead of the biggest asshole ever elected to office
> There are so many things I don’t like about him but some of his policies such as immigration / border enforcement, natural resource utilization, federal workforce reduction, regulatory reduction and tariffs are absolutely legit imho and will take time to have an affect.
For most administrations yea, since they actually try to keep the government running and use a lighter touch, but since this guy took a sledgehammer to everything we’re already feeling the effects, unless you believe the inflation report that’s missing tons of data produced by people who replaced the leaders that gave him numbers he didn’t like previously
I do agree and more was just trying to moderate my comments.
“Look, I know he’s an utter piece of shit who is a known con artist and surrounds himself with sycophants and his policies are demonstrably failing to achieve anything that he claimed, but like, he’s cracking down on immigration and that seems worth unraveling democracy.”
Yeah we probably never will. The part of him that everyone hates is creating a division in the nation. On the flip side I disagree so much with what the Biden administration did I am willing to accept his faults and will bide my time until Vance and Rubio take office when hopefully the hate will subside and we can start to come together as a country.
> hopefully the hate will subside and we can start to come together as a country
Trump got elected on a platform of divisiveness and hate and he’s continued that playbook since. You can’t support him and then seriously say you want the country to come back together.
What centrist ideas do you believe are going to come from any of this? Because this stuff isn’t centrist.
The troops were there to protect Federal Law Enforcement and Federal property. I imagine that would happen in any case regardless of political affiliation. In any case I 100% support that. Federal Officers are there to enforce the law.
>>freedom from criminal prosecution for effectively any act. Were you referring to Biden's son? Seems within scope of the comment.
But you can easily search on Google and find some info. Propublica has an article claiming they investigated 170 cases of citizens detained by ICE, some without communication for more than a day, some physically abused. There’s info out there.
Are we only concerned about deportations of citizens, though? Not illegal detentions? Not abuse? Not deportation of legal residents?
> The sheer number of people that are being processed is due to prior administrations open border policy.
Obama got called the deporter in chief because he deported so many immigrants. It’s possible to enforce immigration laws without having a bunch of masked men snatching people off the street.
I think there’s a real conversation to be had about immigration. But that’s not what’s happening.
> Want to change the law? Do it correctly.
Agreed. Follow the law. Deporting residents in violation of court orders is not following the law. Denying due process is not the law.
Maybe Biden should have enforced the law more effectively. Trump flouting the law doesn’t fix that.
> Were you referring to Biden's son?
No. I was referring to the president. And the Supreme Court essentially granting the president immunity for any and all actions.
Are you under the impression that Hunter Biden was president at some point? Or maybe you believe that Biden being addicted to coke and buying a gun is somehow relevant to any of the actions Trump has taken
Or maybe you’re not acting in good faith and you’re invoking this as a distraction.
This is incredibly rich coming from the person defending Trump, the man who is ruling almost exclusively via executive order.
> The troops were there to protect Federal Law Enforcement and Federal property.
You are OK with them performing rule lawyering to get around the intent of things like not deploying the military into US cities against US citizens. When Trump posted his "Chi-pocalypse Now" meme, do you think he was implying the military was going to Chicago to "protect federal property"? His exact phrasing in the Tweet was "I love the smell of deportation in the morning".
> Were you referring to Biden's son? Seems within scope of the comment.
What are you talking about? He obviously means the *PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY* ruling SCOTUS handed down recently. Don't be obtuse, Biden's son does not have presidential immunity for his actions.
And again, this is rich coming from you considering the people that Trump is pardoning this term...
A key difference here from democracy is that merely living in one place doesn't lock you into a specific legal system.
Of course these also suffer one of the same weaknesses as democracy, e.g. if certain groups disagree with you they can just kill you if they're able. We see this in US for instance where if a guy named Randy Weaver cuts a shotgun 1/4" too short than what the 'people' say your right to bear arms includes and then for contested reasons doesn't show up for court, then a man named Lon Horiuchi can snipe his wife dead while holding a child and then get promoted and go on to do similar things at Waco.
You don’t have a problem with democracy. You’re just a white supremacist. You want a white dictator so you don’t have to worry about the voting rights of minorities or whites who might be sympathetic to minorities.
It's quite possible he didn't even cut the shotgun too short. The barrel of the gun is supposedly in ATF archives somewhere, but no one seems to know where it is. Very convenient.
And that’s shitty and entrapment. Which is why the charges were dismissed.
I wonder how you see the government do something bad and think a dictatorship is the solution.
> The ATF was the only 'white supremacist' that we even suspect Weaver might have discussed gunsmithing with.
Is there something backing this claim? Like, was there testimony somewhere from the rest of the Aryan Nations group that he never discussed this with anyone else?
You’re also putting “white supremacist” in quotes like that’s questionable. Maybe the ATF agent was not a white supremacist but this was at an Aryan Nations meeting and Weaver was a self described white separatist.
OK I stand corrected, you still suspect it, even though the only evidence has turned up is that he dealt to ATF agents after they asked him to do it but actually he was acquitted of that. So you suspect he did this with others without evidence just like I might suspect he is Bigfoot or DB Cooper since I cannot prove that negative.
>I wonder how you see the government do something bad and think a dictatorship is the solution.
I do not. I am not in favor of any monopolistic form of government, so that eliminates both democracy and dictatorships.
I don't have much in the way of critique or judgement to offer on this political philosophy, just an observation: it sounds tribal or even pre-civilization. Out of curiosity I asked an LLM what present day countries most closely implement it. It came back with Somalia and a label: anarcho-libertarianism, with the caveat that it isn't an exact match. Historical examples were also interesting. I'm curious whether you think that's a good example or not.
If the world had more unsettled land I think your ideal would be a lot easier to implement. The U.S. was borne out of people fed up with their current situation (legal or otherwise) deciding to start something new. The fact that it's made up of 50 states, each with their own set of laws and relatively high internal mobility, suggests that its already a mild compromise away from pure democracy and toward your ideal.
To me the purest form of your ideal seems unstable, especially in the face of power imbalances and conflicting choices, and I suspect it would inevitably evolve into something else. As far as I can tell history supports that view.
This allowed Somalia to be one of the few regions in sub-Saharan Africa that had a fairly smooth negotiation between interacting with various tribes while preventing any majority tribe from crushing the minority tribes. Tribes could still live in the same regions and practice their own laws while allowing feuds to be appealed up intertribal 'courts.' Thus even if it was just a guy and a camel and another guy and a camel, you still had law and you could even dish out the consequences yourself but still be held accountable up the chain.
I do agree the 50 states was an interesting and helpful idea. Under the constitutional form of the federal government, which narrowly restrains the federal government via the 10th amendment, there was a lot more room for states to 'compete' yet free travel and trade between the states.
You could probably get a lot closer to a hybrid of ideals by pulling the powers of the federal government way back into what the constitution authorizes. It wouldn't be polycentric law but it would make the monopoly far less onerous, as the cost of moving between jurisdictions is pretty cheap. There were a lot of challenges with racism and sexism in early USA but overall the restraints on the federal government were very good at giving the states a close approximation of polycentric law. Most of this started to get crushed in the very early 1900s and completely crushed by the 30s, although the civil war's elimination of any notion of a right to secession pretty much sealed the deal that the feds could gain an iron grip and the states couldn't check those powers by seceding so they had no real teeth to stop it.
>o me the purest form of your ideal seems unstable
Yes this is the story of the history of man. Hardly any theoretically pure form of governance has been able to exist in the history of man, let alone be stable in that form.
Occasionally you do find a dictatorship that can run with an iron fist and actually subject the majority of the population. A couple of divergent examples are UAE/Dubai -- which ranks higher in economic freedom than the US. On the other hand you have places like DPRK which are just an absolute shithole all around.
Depending on where you're at democracy definitely functions worse, than say a kritarchy (ex: Somalia, which was more prosperous and peaceful and better respect for individual rights under decentralized 'xeer' law than under any democratic government.)
Anyway, if you think people are going to give up their rights without any pushback, you’re in for a really scary decade. 37% will not be able to rule by fiat over the remainder without, essentially, civil war.
Too much main character syndrome, the assumption that in any alternate system they would go up in privilege and status.
I was going to respond to another comments of his in this thread when I realized he was the poster who laid out a false timeline of events by omitting the one comment that made him wrong in another post of mine.
You can also see it with him arguing about how democracy is bad because you’ve been tricked into losing your rights, but also his preferred governmental organization includes being taken advantage of by anyone stronger than you.
His stance is logically inconsistent on even a barest look and his hinting at sovereign citizen arguments and hero’s is telling me the answer is that he’s crazy
“If only there was no government I could live however I want and everyone would have to respect my authority to live however I want.”
The same problem plagues almost every libertarian, they all imagine themselves as John Galt in a potential libertopia.
In actuality, they would end up as a regular person serving the John Galts of the world.
The victims -- conned that because they 'voted' they are part of the 'people' who make up the government and they've only done it to themselves.
We had an imperfect, but still pretty good, example of that. Had. It's been eroding for a while now. But it's eroded the fastest under the current administration, which has tried very hard to overrun all the limits on power, and has succeeded far too often for me.
Those anti-democratic limits are where the devil lies. I think that they can only stay intact indefinitely by having competition for governance. Part of a reason why I'm a proponent of polycentric law, so that a single monopoly of governance can't slowly crush the populace.
Once the majority realizes they can't tyrannize the minority because the minority can run away and work under their own system of law, a balance might be found. Under such a system there is no monopolistic democracy, but people might voluntarily enter into one until they find their rights too suppressed.
Keep going. What happens when the majority refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the minority government?
Go down the hole deep enough and you’ll figure out why everyone who doesn’t want to be a dictator or a dictator’s lackey prefers democracy.
Under the split model they at least have a chance; the minority can bind together, form alliances, and frustrate the 'majorities' force. This is what we see on the world stage -- minority populations like USA or India form alliances and somehow survive without a world government to force the will of a vote of the majority of the world. The USA population is a minority and most are extremely happy it's not a world democracy which is what the logical conclusion of your argument leads to, based on your implied threat that minority USA would experience.
Under your proposal, they all simply are voted into being democracy's 'lackey' assuming the majority don't simply vote them dead.
Not to mention you're contradicting yourself in your statement -- a dictatorship is a minority rule yet you imply they can't exist because the majority would destroy the minority in power.
In reality even in the incredibly unlikely case minorities can't form alliances strong enough it's not worth the risk to try to crush them -- even then in the real world it's often better off for both sides to engage in trade and coexistence rather than to simply kill each other. Of course, even in democracies, war exists, and they would under all other forms of governance.
All modern functioning democracies I’m aware of have a set of rights they have agreed everyone has a right to. This has largely been achieved through bloodshed.
Your idea that we’re should devolve into feudal tribes seems quite obviously destined to result in a great deal of bloodshed. We have the term warlord to describe those who frequently end up in charge in this sort of arrangement.
> a dictatorship is a minority rule yet you imply they can't exist because the majority would destroy the minority in power.
Nowhere did I say or imply that. Those in power usually stay in power because they have power. Numbers are only one sort of power.
Yet Taiwan still exists, all while having less military power than China.
How is that? Seems to throw a bone in your whole idea that a rogue minority government in the envelope of a majority that considers them encompassing part of their country, is destined to fail or devolve into some pre-civilization caveman situation.
>>> Keep going. What happens when the majority refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the minority government?
>> a dictatorship is a minority rule yet you imply they can't exist because the majority would destroy the minority in power.
>Nowhere did I say or imply that. Those in power usually stay in power because they have power. Numbers are only one sort of power.
And here we get to the truth of what you're saying. We can just handwave away 'numbers are only one sort of power' to mean literally anything could happen if the majority refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the minority government. Including, most common on the world stage, simply carrying on with trade while maintaining a tenuous balance and the occasional wars that happen even on inter or intra democracy lines. Because most often, it's not worth a violent fight. So basically, nothing of interest beyond the status quo to note here.
"Go down the hole deep enough" and you’ll figure out why my assertions are true -- the world is a collection of minorities in various alliances that manage to by those means still exist.
Taiwan is largely protected by the US. I expect that absent some other interesting developments, Taiwan will indeed eventually be absorbed into China. And I already addressed the population comment. Population alone is not the only factor to power consolidation.
I do wonder where you imagine all these disenfranchised minorities are expected to flee to in order to establish their independent nations or whatever. There’s literally no unclaimed land on the Earth aside from Antarctica. Are they going to flee to extremely undesirable areas of their existing country and hope the originating country just doesn’t care enough to stop them? Are they going to break away and take valuable land with them? It’s pretty rare for part of a nation to successfully cleave itself away. Even more rare without a massive war.
I don't want to live in your dystopia. Your thesis is that if you just submit to the mob, violence could be less. I don't find life to be an optimization for the least amount of confrontation. I have never asserted my view of the world guarantees no violence. What you have to offer is basically well the same thing could happen to you as happened to a fraction of these other people unless of course you just submit to the mob.
>I do wonder where you imagine all these disenfranchised minorities are expected to flee to in order to establish their independent nations or whatever. There’s literally no unclaimed land on the Earth aside from Antarctica. Are they going to flee to extremely undesirable areas of their existing country and hope the originating country just doesn’t care enough to stop them? Are they going to break away and take valuable land with them? It’s pretty rare for part of a nation to successfully cleave itself away. Even more rare without a massive war.
This applies to any form of human organization. If every country were feudal you could argue democracy was broken because there is no place where it could be practiced. It's not an argument that's able to contrast the two. No matter what form of governance or organization people lived under, their option is either to wait for a vacuum to emerge, to engage in war, to negotiate, or to simply ignore those in power and wait to see what happens -- the same would apply in forming monopolistic democracy where it doesn't exist.
I certainly did not say minorities should submit to the mob. You keep inventing imaginary things for me to have said.
> you could argue democracy was broken because there is no place where it could be practiced
No. You literally said “the minority can run away and work under their own system of law” and I am asking you where in your hypothetical system they could run to.
At the end of the day, you’re falling for a variant of the politician’s fallacy. You see the flaws in the current systems of government and say, okay, here’s a different system. We should do that. But the fact that your system is different does not mean it is better.
Indeed your system is basically just the existing system scaled down with all the same exact issues that arise because humans are flawed, just without the benefit of the centuries of work that have been put into trying to make our current governmental bodies manageable.
You don’t actually get to live your own rules just because you hypothetically run away to live with roughly like-minded folks. The first thing any community does is establish rules. They establish rules that everyone in the community has to follow because the alternative is that bad actors prey on the group from the inside. They restrict your freedoms to protect the group. And sometimes their rules go too far for one person and not far enough for another. Welcome to government. And sure, you can hypothetically go find unclaimed land and start a one man nation with only your rules. Good luck with that.
Your “minorities banding together” to counter the majority is also just more centralized government. Welcome to the European Union. Welcome to these United States. Again, you’ve discovered an existing (reasonably) successful form of government.
Bluntly, you confuse your naïveté with insight. Just because ideas are new to you or you do not recognize them in the existent world does not mean they are actually new.
Could we hypothetically dissolve the USA and create a bunch of feudal territories that operate independently but trade with each other and establish a set of rules for interacting and courts that manage disputes? Sure. We call those things states.
we should assume he is a LLM powered agitprop account or someone mentally unwell and stop wasting time on it.
The most charitable interpretation sometimes is that the person is trolling rather than crazy and willfully misinformed.
OK so you're simply in bad faith lying about the consequences of what you're arguing for. You argument is the one for Taiwan to be absorbed by China and for Ukraine to be absorbed by Russia.
>I certainly did not say minorities should submit to the mob. You keep inventing imaginary things for me to have said.
Yes that is what you have said. That's what democracy is, if the majority say the minority have to do something they must submit. Otherwise the means of government are used against them, usually that's violence, and usually if that is resisted it ends up being escalated until the most violent forms of violence are used. Of course this can still happen under other forms of law, but in democracy it's actually considered legitimate and the populace is actually conned into thinking that's true and they've collectively done it to themselves. Under monopolistic democracy, if you can't make the minority submit to the vote of the majority you simply have a failed democracy.
>>“we can just live like a bunch of independent tribes and no one will interfere if we can get rid of that pesky central government” idea is not based in reality. We have seen that underpowered minority groups get frequently trampled.
Strawman. And under any form of governance, interference still ends up happening.
>No. You literally said “the minority can run away and work under their own system of law” and I am asking you where in your hypothetical system they could run to.
Under polycentric law you don't physically run away. You run away into a new system of law.
>Bluntly, you confuse your naïveté with insight. Just because ideas are new to you or you do not recognize them in the existent world does not mean they are actually new.
I'm naïve but apparently up until now you still haven't figured out that you don't need to claim a new territory to adopt a new system of law in a polycentric law society. The fact you don't understand you didn't have to physically run away means you had no idea what you were even arguing against. And your naïveté about the application of democracy means you have no idea what you were even arguing for. You are stuck in the notion of a geographic monopoly of government, which is why you assumed if not democracy the only other option is a dictatorship while ignoring historically that hasn't even been universally true let alone in theory.
> You’re just a white supremacist. You want a white dictator
I want to close with these thoughts here. You're not arguing in good faith. You have, before any of this, publicly declared I'm a white supremacist who wants a white dictator. Maybe because I disagreed with your politics or maybe because I disagreed with an innocent wife with a child in her arms being sniped by an agent of the state after we the people thought the husband cut a barrel 1/4" shorter than what the glorious people think the right to bear arms includes and he didn't show up on time for the thing he was actually found innocent of (tellingly, you were very concerned about Weaver's possibility of being a racist but not at all about the state murdering a wife). I've been incredibly, incredibly kind and understanding despite the vitriol you've said about me. So please understand when I won't entertain this bad faith further.
That is called lying
It's contested and speculative, but a reasonable projection of Trump V Harris gives >50% to Trump in a finall runoff for majority.
>… waaay more than 50%…
You posted a lot of words to still not prove that claim
>>Well, no. It was 49.8% of the people that voted from him, which was ~44.4% of the voting age population.
>You posted a lot of words to still not prove that claim
A response was that Trump was the 'lesser' of the two evils.
Someone then claimed Trump got less than the majority of all votes.
Then I pointed out that when you narrow it to the 'two evils', which was the original claim, that it quite likely the majority.
In fact, if you restrict to the two evils, trump did get the majority of the vote of the 'evils.' And if you forced those who voted for someone other than the 'evils' to pick an 'evil', something like 80+% of them would have to pick Harris in order for Trump not to get the majority vote of a runoff for the evils. Possible, but I think unlikely (also consider a very large portion of those 1.x% remaining were libertarian votes who tend to lean more R than D).
> It was waaay more than 50%, and good ideas take time to execute but it's going swimmingly so far.
I’m assuming you’re in bad faith now, so have a good day
Makes you wonder what side the Times is really on here.
It's a garage fire-sale and China has just to sit there and wait.
Non-techies don't conflate Apple with Netflix. Why do techies consistently conflate the NYT with Newsnation?
I am not saying the China shock was fake, or state surveillance is fine, or that they don’t exploit migrant workers, or that their currency manipulation and financial repression were/are good. I just think we should be skeptical that national security arguments are motivated by virtue, especially when “the good” is largely confined to what’s good for USA tech
This is not a left versus right thing. China being unchallenged in the world will spell a quality of life decrease for us in the West. They are not “the good guys.” You’re free to see both parties as ‘neutral’ in alignment, but you still don’t want to have to be the losing party when they come into conflict. My point is China is not going to be sharing any of what they gain with Americans, even the ones who cheer for them - it’ll in fact be coming at your expense.
The CPC having a direct feed into the brains of every Gen Z and younger American is trivially easy to exploit - and there is a 0% chance that they won’t do so next year when they will likely invade Taiwan. If China is in control of TikTok, they’ll boost a ton of propaganda, supposedly people “from Taiwan” who greet the PLA as liberators, explaining how Taiwan being independent is actually oppression, and how they’ve always considered themselves part of the PRC, only evil politicians were keeping them apart. And they’ll make sure to suppress all media that exposes the violence on the ground. Finally, they’ll boost content urging Americans to protest US involvement and to sabotage the military, such as by chaining themselves to ships, etc.
Ryan McBeth has made a ton of videos laying out how this will work, and he does a better job than I have of explaining this.
TikTok is a cyberweapon.
In Gen Z's eyes, America is bad for Americans. That's what happens when you build a low trust society. America spent decades trying to build up a strong rapport among citizens and they tore it down and sold them out in a single generation.
Maybe china will be worse. But the appeals to nationalism simply will not work among our youth. We abandoned them, they will see the village burned to feel its warmth. Already happened in 2024.
China's soft rule will not be as incompetent.
1. China overtakes the US -> US society directly decines and thats it. (Your scenario)
2. China overtakes the US -> It takes out the elites with everyone else (what Gen-Z likely wants to see)
3. US manages to hold on -> Elites continue their trajectory of snapping everything up leaving the crumbs for everyone else. (The best case scenario pro-US people can hope for right now)
4. US manages to hold on -> They somehow decide to reform and implement v2.0 of New Deal. (The dream of the bernie sanders wing ie. a pipedream at this point)
You are really showing your age with your attitude.
Put yourself in Gen-Z's shoes. What is realistic at this point? What can even millenials hope for?
The best case is that they end up being a transitional generation that helps their kids survive their childhood and grow into a decent adult life. The worse case is managed decline.
Either way Gen Y and Gen Z are done for. This amazing American system you defend has ruined these generations long term outlooks and Trump's bumbling has already written their final chapters.
China has pulled many poor people or of poverty. Generations. You don't see this in media. You're comment is just misinformed and wrong.
Gen Z is simply unique as the "full immersion" generation. It's uniquely hard to ignore the youth unemployment for kids who are spending more than ever to be educated, or being hard locked out of minimum wage jobs our parents would scare us with because they lack a bachelor's degree.
The issue is that trust was intentionally sabotaged.
And what says has China on the advances of Americans geopolitical ambitions? I’m not saying they are the good guys obviously, but at this point as an European between China maybe invading Taiwan and the US openly threatening to take control of allied territory (Greenland) or on the verge of starting another war for oil control (Venezuela), I’m not sure what’s worst for "the west". And that’s not even talking about climate change, science, etc. Who is more aligned with a sustainable future for the world?
> TikTok is a cyberweapon
I’m far more concerned by the YouTube, Twitter/X and Facebook cyber weapons that have been radicalizing and destroying our societies for more than a decade. Just the other day a fake video about a coup in France trended on Facebook and not even our President could have it removed. Have you also see the plan of the US to weaken the EU by targeting countries to make them leave the EU? Again not saying China are good guys, but it’s time Americans freaking out about China have a hard look in the mirror.
Can't be taken seriously if you're going to elide that "detail".
The platform’s direct financial incentives are almost identical to malicious state actors’: to foment extreme engagement. It is not a secret to anyone that people engage most actively with outrage.
Content moderation costs money directly, then costs engagement indirectly.
I’m genuinely confused by your comment.
You said X has no incentive to allow foreign influence ops. Very clearly, not only do they have an incentive to allow them, but they have an additional disincentive to disallowing them (cost).
The fact those aligned incentives originate from different ultimate goals is totally irrelevant for as long as the two are aligned.
A Chinese owned TikTok simply doesn't follow the same calculus. If the CEO of Bytedance (note different from the CEO of TikTok) gets a order flood the platform with anti-Taiwanese propaganda right before China invades Taiwan, the CEO would have to follow through even if it causes the value of TikTok to zero. The ban was not about how much harm TikTok has done already, it's about how much harm they can do in a worst case scenario.
Beyond that, you're just asserting a bunch of assumptions as if they're fact.
And all of this is irrelevant. I never argued TikTok/X/Meta are the same. The issue I raised is you positioning 2016 enforcement action as evidence of X's current enforcement posture and then suggesting there is some compliance motivation here (there isn't – there's no relevant law to comply with as far as USG is concerned) and suggesting there's no incentive to allow foreign ops (there is, as demonstrated).
Like this US one?
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
America's incompetent leadership is self-inflicted. Biden's 2020 campaign strategy was pro status quo ante - which I find similar to your appeal to "normalcy". Unfortunately (for future American global primacy), this message did not resonate with voters in 2024. I suspect "getting back to normal" is not enough for Gens Y & Z, who have already lost a class war whose existence they may not be aware of.
Big Capital is not my friend and its not most peoples friend, even if some of us here were lucky enough to be useful to them for now.
The only way some millennials will own house is by inheriting them from boomers, and the rest of the housing stock will be mostly bought by corporate investors. Everyone else will rent until death, and provide reccuring income to make the graph go up.
My previous bosses would move to fire me or get me transferred out of their org if they found out I valued getting my employees paid more, over literally anything else that moved the bottom line.
> And when we vote we need to remember that things that look bad for us homeowners like allowing big development companies to come in and raze all of our houses and build townhomes and apartments for rent might be necessary to keep the bad situation from getting worse.
This has been explained for years. At best the reaction gotten from homeowners can be paraphrased to, “yea, I hope you keep the commons working, but I got my bag”
> Or, if we do nothing and let the status quo reign, our kids will suddenly find themselves renting everything they use for the rest of their lives.
There’s other options too after the ballot box stops working and your life is permanently worse under the status quo, but you are not allowed to discuss those options on Western social media sites
Sheltered Gen-Z Americans, who have never known a disordered society love to talk about revolution, but they are so ill prepared for something like that. It’s not even funny. To be clear, none of us in the “first world” are prepared for something like that.
You know why he did it? Credible threat of violent revolution.
That's what it takes.
When we are discussing the United States of America, the nation founded on one of the most famously successful violent revolutions, to the point that we teach our children to celebrate it every year, your claim is that violent revolutions can not be a solution?
I'm tired of this "China is exploiting Gen Z", the US is a propaganda machine and has been for decades. Now they are mad that China is taking their space.
The last war China was involved with was 1979 compared to America, today mind you, that is on the cusp of invading Venezuela because Rubio has a moronic axe to grind.
It's really hard to not see the facade for what it is: rich people are upset that their world order is collapsing.
Frankly who care? Give me universal medicare, universal childcare, and public higher education then maybe, just maybe, I might start to care about all this stuff that only seems to make people lives worse not better.
Sadly you have to start caring for things to get better first.
Why am I suppose to care that people in Africa are pushing for better worker rights and decolonialization? Because the executives as Nestle might make slightly lower money? That big tech can't extract more blood minerals? Boo hoo, it's not like this has ever benefited American citizens writ large.
Also the UN is worthless, if this is suppose to scare people you might lose your hat come election night in 2026.
And I’ll take recognizing a communist party over dropping napalm on em.
From a European standpoint: The ideal outcome is a stalemate between China and the US, with us as the kingmaker.
We could basically do the same thing as Yugoslavia did during the Cold War and play both sides against one another, extracting concessions from both.
Y'all've got a lot of headwinds, and America should be helping you with them instead of posturing and pretending to be friends with our enemies.
America needs to get closer to Europe and India, democratic East Asia, Mexico, Vietnam ... not this bullshit we're doing right now.
I agree. But not many are one of the largest economies in the world and the world's most prolific regulator.
> America should be helping you with them instead of posturing and pretending to be friends with our enemies.
I also agree, but unfortunately the American electorate and its elites have proven deeply untrustworthy. I wish it wasn't so, but that's what happened.
With that in mind, the best outcome for us is to hope for American power to decrease relative to China to increase our own leverage.
Its just another side, with its own motivation, these days backstabbing and insulting those few friends that stubbornly still linger around for historical reasons, changing opinions frequently. Unreliable as are its sophisticated warfare products. Morals what?
Aside: This reminds me that pro-CCP astroturfing has been increasingly prevalent and visible on the fediverse recently...
Besides, military invasion of an independent non-aggressive country is a global concern. Like Russia invading Ukraine was or a hypothetical US invasion of Venezuela would be.
Toss in the current treatment of the Uyghur population and I think you've got a good argument against China on this one.
china hasnt pulled out of tibet, or xinjiang, and its pretty clearly an occupying force there in the same way the the US was in iraq/Afghanistan, israel in gaza, or russia in ukraine.
china been continuously doing the bad behaviour that the US is only sometimes doing
can you clarify if you’re talking about China or the US?
IMO the bigger problem is that national security is only part of the problem. An unknowable algorithm controlled by the Ellisons is not necessarily less dangerous than one controlled by China, the motivations are just different.
Every attempt to ban the copycat app on Google store by the French was useless, since a new copycat app would pop up the next second.
So it's not like tiktok is some new innovation. What they did is still amazing, but malevolent, but credit where credit is due.
(I don’t use TikTok so I don’t know first hand!)
If you want proof, watch someone’s feed with them. Invariably they will start to apologize. Classic “he’s different when we’re alone” rationalization for an addictive substance
Is that unique to any one social media? Our internet browsing is pretty intimate. I dont even want my family seeing my moment to moment feed.
This is my experience as well. I don't use the app, so my only direct experience is watching with someone scrolling their feed.
Perhaps the algorithm has gotten better since, but I had no reason to want to use it after that.
If Insta and youtube shorts get enough traction, there's no reason creators won't simply post to each of them to maximize their reach. The legacy platforms are heavily courting/promoting short form video, why leave possible monetization on the table?
Hell, I'm too old for their demo, but I see TikTok videos posted to Reddit and even BlueSky.
They are both very similar obviously, but the social network on one isn't the same as the other.
A lot of the people in my age group (Millennials) decided that TikTok was where we were going to get off the "hot new social media platform" train.
The Zoomers and GenAlpha kids seemed to be the people really using it, but I'm just a crotchety old guy with a bald head and a gut and an office job at this point, so I don't know what the hip young people are up to with their Tok Clocks and their loud rock music.
I heard this argument about TV and videogames before
Have you every heard a heroin addict comparing heroin to TV?
Sports, dance, family, etc.
Everybody knows too many people for an anecdote to make videogames and heroin the same. It's like pointing out some school shooter played a violent video games; so did the people they shot. You need to disprove the null hypothesis; not show that there exists evidence.
That's like saying "one who cannot go without food is the same as one who is addicted to heroin." You're engaging in superficiality to the point that all distinction is made meaningless.
> It's like pointing out some school shooter played a violent video games
That's a totally different argument
Yes, that's the point.
>That's a totally different argument
Not really. It's the Millenial equivalent the satanic rock scare. Politicians will always use these kinds of tricks to influence opinion and even enact laws.
I want more than sound bites if we're going to compare addiction to something as well studied as hard drugs.
I hate social media more than most people do, and I don't use tiktok and don't think anyone else should, but can we all please stop comparing a mobile phone app to using heroin? It's misinformed and dangerous to make rhetorical comparisons like that.
Everyone knows Facebook/Meta is actually the heroin. A product intentionally designed to steal your life and enrich its owners. Duh
Is this a satirical post? I'm really struggling to comprehend it coherently
Did you mean nicotine?
> Only people with no actual life experience with drugs or drug users would make such an asinine and overtly hyperbolic statement as that.
Ma'am withdrawing from tiktok cannot kill you. Consuming tiktok cannot kill you. Tiktok does not make you shit yourself
Also assuming your heroin isn't tainted it isn't toxic and you can have a normal life expectancy.
Can we all stop pretending it's a not an issue?
The US did a good job of taking those away, so it's hard to complain when others come in to fill that void.
China just wants us to buy cheap Chinese crap.
>Tiktok does not give you a 5 year life expectancy
12 year old life expectancy then?
> The lawsuit, filed in the US claims that Isaac Kenevan, 13, Archie Battersbee, 12, Julian "Jools" Sweeney, 14, and Maia Walsh, 13, died while attempting the so-called "blackout challenge". Four children died because of, compared to one, who injects?
Heroin invokes addiction, TikTok does that. Heroin can cause physical dependency, TikTok brews this. Heroin is highly addictive, isn't TikTok to the young viewer?
I still hold my point that TikTok can be distilled and viewed as a form of Digital Heroin. Evidence shows.
How else do you describe it's nature?
TikTok is in no way like heroin, stop using that false analogy
How is it not a form of digital heroin when the effects are digital?
Heroin destroys your mind, And one could argue without moderation any other thing can do too.
If it's the first thing you think about when you wake up, and it kills you to sleep at night, and you think about it all day, sure, one's a highly addictive habit that destroys lives, and the other is heroin. Which is also a highly addictive habit that destroys lives. Funnily enough, one destroys lives because it's legal, and the other destroys lives because it's illegal. But if you're taking your phone to bed with you at night, and it's the first thing you check in the morning, before you even have a thought to yourself, okay, you're not injecting it with a needle under a freeway underpass but after you get fired for watching TikTok on the clock and can't pay your rent, is you're landlord gonna care when you don't pay rent whether you got fired for drugs or a smartphone addiction?
Because "digital heroin" is a nonsense phrase used as a thought-terminating cliché.
> when the side-effects are the same of?
Assuming that this is intended to be something like "when the side effects are the same as those of heroin?" then the premise is false; the effects (side or otherwise) of TikTok are not meaningfully similar to those of heroin.
some people feel like they are addicted to short form content but it’s really nothing like a drug addiction much less an addiction to something as devastating as heroin
It's highly addictive. The negative effects are somewhat diffuse and may take a while to really impact your life, but they're very real.
And, rather importantly, it's legal and widely available, and the industry behind them is suppressing evidence of their harms and making tons of money off of addiction.
TikTok causes chemical release in the brain and which can cause other self psychological damage. Heroin causes chemical release in the brain in the brain, and can cause other self psychological damage.
Both are addictions, both are hard to fight. Some find it easier some find it hard.
The effects of one are more devastating sure, Alcohol is more damaging than Caffeine; I'm not ruling that out.
However the effects of Heroin which comes with addiction and the cravings are some-what mimicked within the realms of TikTok.
To op below: I'm now rate limited, so I can't reply directly.
A drug, a real life substance that is designed to alter human chemistry. Cannabis, Caffine, MDMA, DMT all alter your brain chemistry organically.
You cannot compare one or to something that is man-made digital. You can however compare the effects of a substance that is organically designed to that of something is digital. The relation of effects of TikTok to Heroin are very similar.
Social media is being designed as a digital service to alter human chemistry. It works, why do you think the world is in utter shit? Why do you think social enterprises pay big bucks to exploit the human psyche by hiring sociologists/psychologists?
The TikTok icon on mobile devices is strategically designed to manipulate and trigger a response.
Facebook is a grand example with the A/B emotional testing they did with Cambridge Analytica which that is that is far worse then heroin IMO. At least with Heroin you need to inject.
You're literally describing any activity that someone enjoys generating natural dopamine, and then comparing it to a drug that crosses your blood-brain barrier and mimicks your brain's chemistry to give you a super-charged chemical version of that. The difference in dopamine levels is orders of magnitude. Your brain re-wires itself to handle the level of dopamine produced and you start only feeling normal if you're constantly using the drug. I would be surprised if Tiktok generated even 1/10th the dopamine level of using methamphetamine. It all honestly sounds quite fun, but my awareness of the consequences will prevent me from ever trying them.
Eating a good meal, having sex, finishing writing your first novel, winning a race, doing breath work, doing yoga, rock climbing, and an unlimited supply of examples generate dopamine in our brains the same way that Tiktok does. They can all ruin your life just as much, if you allow them to.
A much better comparison would be to describe Tiktok as a "digital slot machine", and indeed slot machine mechanics have been heavily studied by social media platforms to make usage more habitual. Nir Eyal's Hooked was an interesting and informative read on this topic. If he describes social media as heroin in the book I'll happily take the self-own.
> TikTok causes chemical release in the brain
Basically everything causes a chemical release in the brain. For example HN does as well, would you compare posting on HN to heroin?
> both are hard to fight
I know and knew people both addicted to heroin and to TikTok. Let me assure you that ditching a short-form content addiction is VASTLY more easy than ditching heroin.
> the effects of Heroin which comes with addiction and the cravings are some-what mimicked within the realms of TikTok
This is true for everything that humans enjoy. Next you gonna say that talking a walk in nature or working out is like heroin because I enjoy it and I’m addicted to it (if I don’t do it every day I feel bad and I have a compulsion to do it every day)
> why do you think the world is in utter shit
I disagree with that assessment, the “world” as a whole is actually much better than it used to be 30 years ago. Of course that might not be the case for you individually but then this thread is more about your feelings than an objective observation of the world.
> At least with Heroin you need to inject.
Most heroin users don’t inject which ones again shows you don’t know anything about it outside of tropes and cliches.
“At least with TikTok you need a smartphone and internet and swipe to unlock” - see how dumb that makes me sound?
Don’t get me wrong I dislike the tech hegemony and social media as much as you - I just think your way of arguing damages your position more than it helps it.
I see it as Digital Heroin. If others, you don't, fine.
Social Media is addicting. I use none and explaining it as " digital heroin" may be an extreme way to present the thought but at least it's bluntly represents the curse of it. Finally, it's not the teenagers at fault. It's the governments in the first place for allowing this. I saw it on the wall when Facebook came to be back in 2007.
Unfortunately, whether it's a deadly drug or a deadly disease, these casual references are unlikely to drop from public discourse anytime soon. And I personally would rather live in a world where insensitive or potentially-triggering language is gently discouraged, than one where the pendulum swings too far the other way towards censorship or radical left woke cancel culture. Words can be unintentionally callous without being "micro-aggressions". (And I say that as a liberal progressive.)
Thanks for posting in a personal and persuasive manner, instead of anger. Yours is the more effective approach anyway.
I'd hope to hold this community to a higher standard than "the public discourse".
For those that are downvoting this based on vibes, please feel free to get recent view counts that prove me wrong.
YouTube keeps pushing it harder and harder. On the AppleTV, search often returns 90% Shorts, with no way to filter them out.
TikTok is Chinese Youtube & YouTube is Western TikTok
Both are cancer.
Sure, you can find white paper previews on Tiktok.
Well yeah, it's existed longer. You can't compare one service like YouTube, a streaming platform for video vs TikTok which is a viral social platform.
> Can you find research seminars on TikTok? TikTok isn't nor the platform for such. This link has results.
What's ironic is that ultimately their suspicion that TikTok was influenced by the PRC to push an anti-Israel agenda was most probably incorrect. Israel lost the narrative in the West because it simply did a lot of shitty things in the war, and everyone from homeless people to war refugees carry around an HD camcorder in their pocket now. I still see shocking videos of what the IDF is doing in Gaza on a monthly basis, on Instagram of all places.
2026 in a nutshell, yes. The Daily Watergate of American history.
They won't. The entire point of this charade is to remind Americans we can't expect any better than instagram or youtube.
Its not out of goodwill, but the objective of "don't be ad ridden slop maximizing shareholder gain" was a bar you didn't even need to step over
All other outcomes on the table, you have no input or direction on this company. And people seem to be justifying US interference on the basis that its influence warrants public direction.
Well then that same logic would justify it being controlled by the public, no?
This is another sign of the US' decline. The refusal to follow inconvenient laws.
Allowing the executive branch sway over the enforcement of laws that they're ostensibly beholden to prevents enforcement at all, which robs the citizens of the United States of the protection they've been afforded.
- Jan 16: The Supreme Court issues its opinion, upholding the legality of the TikTok ban. The Biden administration declines to enforce it, preferring to let the incoming Trump administration handle the matter.
- Jan 18: TikTok voluntarily turns off its services. Google and Apple remove the app from their respective app stores. Trump declares on social media that he will sign an executive order "to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect".
- Jan 19: TikTok restores it service after being assured by the incoming Trump administration that TikTok would not face penalties.
- Jan 20: The Trump administration signs the aforementioned executive order.
However, Trump's executive order was untimely (the law already should have gone into effect), and at any rate it's dubious that the executive order would've been legal regardless. The TikTok ban (PAFACA) had a specific provision for when an extension could be granted. From Wikipedia:
> The president may grant a one-time extension of the divestiture deadline by as long as 90 days if a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, "significant" progress has been made to executing the divestiture, and legally binding agreements for facilitating the divestiture are in place.
Notably, none of these requirements had been met. There were no identified buyers; there were no binding agreements. The Trump administration's refusal to enforce the TikTok ban might have been the first lawless act of the second administration, and it happened only within hours of Trump being sworn in.
Yes. There is a series of executive orders (eg [1]) that literally say "To permit the contemplated divestiture to be completed, the Attorney General shall not take any action on behalf of the United States to enforce the Act ...". The "PROTECTING AMERICANS FROM FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATIONS ACT" only allows the US AG to sue for enforcement, so this essentially is completely waiving enforcement.
This is why congress often gives independent agencies or private actors the right to sue in an act - because the DOJ cannot be trusted to fairly enforce laws if there is even the slightest political or economic valence to them.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/savi...
That's dumb.
I mean..
what about ..the slightest political or economic valence to..
um..
the Attorney General?
or even worse..
what about ..the slightest political or economic valence.. to ..independent agencies or private actors.
That's, like, explicit corruption isn't it? We'll give this private actor or independent entity the exclusive right to be the defacto enforcer for whatever laws. (Laws they themselves probably asked, sorry "lobbied", for?)
If you can trust some ..independent.. entity, I'm sorry, that means you can make the cops independent in the same way and trust them to enforce that law. If it's impossible that the cops can be set up to be independent in a way that prevents corruption, then how is the ..independent.. entity set up that it prevents corruption?
I hadn't realized that was going on. That's insanity. Wow we're corrupt.
Basically, Congress did not do its job and ignored the very law they voted for.
Am I ignoring the TikTok law? No, because it's not my job to enforce it.
The executive branch is the one that ignores the law.
It feels like this is increasingly the case. Not sure what the solutions are.
Can cronyism become more blatant?
Now if the issue was Hunter Biden being on the board at all -- even if independent of any Joe Biden dealmaking -- then I'm very curious how the Republicans sounding alarms back then react to the Barron Trump TikTok board seat now.
did I miss the news that the US government forced a deal that transferred partial ownership of a foreign company to Burisma, and put Hunter on the board?
We see something similar in Europe in that Musk burps out the EU must disband after they fined his company for breaking local laws. It's like a really stupid variant of corporatocracy dominating the USA right now; at the least in the past it was a bit more subtle. Now it is like barbarian posing as oligarchs are having crazy fits. I think 99.9% of their wealth must be confiscated and given to The People - too much wealth makes the mind weak and leads them to act as tyrannical parasites.
A couple major differences here are:
* Not video
* Meant more for commmunity/interactivity
* Not individual algorithmic
So a site like this optimizes for most-user-upvoted content, to try to surface content that is found interesting by people who are presumably somewhat like you. That seems pretty different from a self-serving platform that optimizes for whatever keeps you from blinking.
absolutely!
- not ad driven
- not follower / likes driven (yes, there's karma but there's no concept of following people, notifications for likes, etc.)
- not engagement driven
- not algorithmically driven (yes, the home page is, but you can just do /active for example, or /new ; I rarely go the home page)
- there isn't an endless amount of "new content"
- no hosted content (you have to link to something to show it)
- no revenueIf not, the sale is illegal. Congress passed a law saying that TikTok was to be banned. Not "can be sold after a bunch of backroom deals by tech aristocracy that happens to be friends with an incredibly corrupt President", but banned. SCOTUS agreed that the law held up to scrutiny.
The bigger issue is that the Trump directed the AG not to enforce the law. So something is plainly illegal but is de-facto legal because of executive pronouncement. That is extremely worrying because one aspect of totalitarianism is that the dicta of the ruler has effect of law.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815/...
This is the way. I wonder if we'll ever see the day that consumers get a fighting chance.
It'll be Larry Ellison, a slaver nation, and a PE surveillance focused firm having consensual access to your data! And the US government!
we did it guys!
In China if the government makes a request for data the courts are not involved, the company has no ability to push back and they cannot disclose any info about government requests.
They can also voluntarily give it over, and as part of a contract for money
> This was never about addressing privacy, propaganda, or national security. It was always about the U.S. stealing ownership of one of the most popular and successful short form video apps in history because companies like Facebook were too innovatively incompetent to dethrone them in the open market. Ultimately this bipartisan accomplishment not only makes everything worse, it demonstrates we’re absolutely no better than the countries we criticize.
I think when PAFACA passed and set up a ban of TikTok, it was in fact about privacy and propaganda and national security. It’s just that the Trump administration looks at every single situation as an opportunity for grift and corruption, and they abused the opportunity.
The deal does shift algorithmic control and moderation to US based entities. I am not sure what that means in reality. Maybe they can just say they’re in control but choose to use the existing system? Who knows. The terms of the deal look like they help with the original concerns on the face of it.
I disagree. I think was about making sure Americans see the "RIGHT" propaganda.
American companies just want to acquire all our money. China wants to convince us to withdraw from the rest of the world so they can take over everything they want.
People get tunnel-vision. Facebook is for "Facebook things", TikTok is for "TikTok things". Reels, stories, whatevers isn't "TikTok".
It's why Facebook bought Instagram. No matter if Facebook copied Instagram down to the pixel, it still wouldn't be Instagram. And it's why the branding has remained consistent.
Same thing with Google and YouTube.
It's why these acquisitions happen and why these companies become something else. Google to Alphabet, Facebook to Meta, etc.
This just forces the sale of TikTok to someone in the U.S.
What I imagine the incentive is is not the ability to censor the media, but to have the media on record of who posts it and who engages with it and maintain that ledger. When people get banned and slandered for denouncing a genocide, it becomes harder and harder to call this stuff "low-IQ conspiracy slop".
You can, of course, make the argument that Facebook, Twitter, etc are also similar threats to other countries and _that is why they aren't allowed in China_.
I agree that this resolution is a worst-case-scenario outcome, though.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's the logical endgame here.
This only makes sense. People correctly understood that foreign media organizations are a risk to self-governance and the tech companies which took much of their power should be treated the same way.
Surely search is something that should be more neutral than social media.
When you see a massive donor to the IDF and Israeli causes like Larry Ellison leading the consortium to buy it right after those comments, dismissing it as a conspiracy is ignorant considering they're basically saying the quiet part out loud.
https://www.jewishfederations.org/blog/all/jewish-federation...
And new owners have directly donated to Israeli's war efforts:
https://www.newarab.com/news/pro-israel-billionaires-and-uae...
Probably because like 1/4 of the American economy at this point is held up by surveillance capitalism firms like Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. all of whom's bread and butter is violating privacy on an industrial scale, so saying "TikTok is dangerous because it spies on people" is flagrantly hypocritical.
The fact that the big scary Chinese Government can tweak algorithms to elevate content and potentially sway public opinion is a fair criticism and I would agree with it, if not for the fact that the hypothetical situation being used to justify it is America equally openly funding and supporting an ongoing genocide. That barely qualifies as propaganda, that's literally just pointing out what the United States is doing and why it's ethically indefensible, and we could stop doing it tomorrow and utterly defang the aforementioned propaganda. But we don't.
And, lastly, TikTok is not going away. It's simply going to enrich Americans now, instead of the Chinese. A bit. And I'm sure plenty of that money will find it's way back to the Trump administration because our country is corrupt as all hell.
So forgive me if I've just absolutely not one ounce of patience for this bullshit.
> This was never about addressing ... national security
You have no idea what you are talking about.
It sounds like the author would have preferred that a different group of billionaires take over.
It's very optimistic to assume that China was beaten here.
Bytedance still owns the algorithm and 30% of the new company. This new wrapper firm is just being granted the license to serve as Bytedance's operations, essentially. All the stuff about it being 'trained on US content' and 'overseen' by Oracle is smoke and mirrors. This is really just the zombie of the deal that was done four years[1] ago and then quietly scrubbed.
This isn't significantly different than the way TikTok has been operating all along, the only difference is a few of the administration's cronies are able to get their heads into the feeding trough.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/19/trump-says-he-has-approved-t...
If your first reaction is “but that won’t work!” then you don’t really believe in a free speech based society, and all that’s left to do is argue over which group of shadowy billionaires should get to control everyone.
who are you intending to tell about these tiktok lies? how do you know if youve told the right people? what algorithm is going to pick up your corrections as equally viral as the lies were?
if youre actually going to do it, i think you need your own shadowy billionaire funding paying the various social media companies to pretend that your version of the truth is popular. maybe multiple shadowy billionaires.
While I believe in free speech, free speech isn't some panacea. Nor does it magically exist without protection from powerful interests. What good does speaking up do, if "algorithms" managing the majority of speech have big money riding on promoting irresponsible speech at the expense of sidelining responsible speech.
This isn't a neutral open marketplace of ideas, battling on merit. It is a pervasively manipulated market for profit, and those who will pay to tilt it.
The right way to deal with surveillance and dossier based manipulation by external actors, is not to pick on one actor, but to make surveillance and dossier based manipulation illegal for all actors.
Nobody buys a TV wanting their watching habits to end up impacting what ads they see in web views, and vice versa.
That kind of behind the scenes coordination of unpermissioned data, as leverage against the sources of the data, is deeply anti-libertarian. Anti-liberty in both right and left formulations. (The idea that "libertarian" means the rich have a pass to do anything they can achieve with money, underhanded or not, is a corruption of any concept of individual liberty.)
The enshittification of the world is being driven by this hostile business model. Via permissionless (or permissioned by dark pattern) coordinated privacy violations. And it isn't just foreign adversaries who are benefiting at societies cost.
The constant collecting, collating, and converging of data on anyone doing anything that pervades the private/public economy now is deeply parasitical.
Free speech, like every other right, only achieves its real value in a healthy environment. I.e. a healthy idea competitive environment. I believe in voting too. But similarly, voting only matters in a healthy competitive candidate environment.
Whichever is better for the majority of people. This the same answer for democracy
I don't know how we conclude that:
> The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX.
> the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance)
> 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”
Now we have oligarchs, plus a major surveillance investor group, plus the Chinese.
This doesn't seem to be a solution to anything except that "a deal was made", and any further attempts at cleaning up credible risks have so many players to deal with, they would be DOA.