I don’t get how can Americans be so insecure about themselves and have such fragile trust in what they can achieve as a country. This idea that foreign authoritarian regimes should be respected as much as their own people and system is just baffling.
The country is constantly on a knife edge. It takes only a tiny shift to cause a radical change in the power structure, and good reason to think that power structure will be used against you.
It is indeed remarkable that the country has achieved anything at all when it spends so much time cowering. Nor is that new, but modern media seem to give it more immediacy.
I disagree based purely off of my own life and experiences. The shift rightward over the past 10 years is palpable. It's not surprising historically at all - the US has always been composed of almost entirely conservative, individualistic attitudes and then little pockets of progressiveness here and there. They never last, rather the hope is just to get as much done as fast as possible in that time frame.
Certainly, policy that would be unthinkable 15 years ago is par for the course now. I think that's just undeniable, and speaks to the radicalization of the US.
Take a deep breath, we're all gonna be okay.
While you are preparing brisket they are expecting to lose rights and have friends taken away. For them it is not going to be ok.
Everything will be okay, nobody is losing their rights. Try getting out of California/NYC some time.
Maybe you should try to get out of the technofacist mindset?
Respect doesn't mean that you have to agree. If you believe that something is wrong, use arguments, educate, inform... It's hard to implement pathological behaviour in well informed and educated society. Fragile society, however, is easier to be manipulated with and lead to hate, violence and wars.
What's wrong with this solution?
An example of an anti-solution is lowering crime by making something that was illegal no longer illegal (see: public transit vs automobiles). Or, reducing the incidence of something by making it illegal while simultaneously increasing it's necessity (see: abortion). Or, solving wage inequality by protesting minimum wage increases.
I think imposing certain limits on various freedoms, including speech is required for a functioning democracy. I also believe that there are deeper issues if the populace of a nation no longer respect the decisions made by its highest court of law.
We've got the whole world wearing blue jeans and listening to our music, mostly communicating on our tech platforms. English is the default language for international business. One Chinese social media company and its game over? Have some faith in your culture.
Every bad thing we’ve been taught to believe about China or Russia, it turns out we do too and often worse. So what loyalty should we have? What has democracy and capitalism done for us but bankrupt our seniors with medical debt and addict our children to iPads and amphetamines?
I’d love to be able to trust my government and the American ideal again, but don’t tell me I’m weak for second-guessing the whole con game this century is turning into.
Radicaly increased wealth. I guess you have access to drinking water, food, place to sleep and be warm at cold sessions. It wasn't a standard few decades ago and still it is not fot most in the world.
"I’d love to be able to trust my governmen..."
Do you really believe that government solve your problems?
“Radically increased wealth”, for who? Government has never solved my problems, only created more. My point is that I would have been doing better under China’s system than ours.
I’m not sure how you can say this with a straight face. China hit rock bottom after the cultural revolution and they had a lot of “the only place left to go is up!” going on. This is like someone saying their salary increased 5X from $10k to $50k and calling that better than someone’s salary only going up by a third from $200k to $300k. Yes, the improvements have been great, and while your life would have improved more under Chinese rule (velocity), do you really think your position would be better off? (And imagine only making $50k or $100k/year and houses still start at a million bucks!)
If you don’t like government meddling, China probably isn’t the place for you. Yes, they might not pay attention that you aren’t following some rule for awhile, but the rule exists and they will eventually hit you with non-compliance.
Years of TikTok usage
Let's be honest: "Democracy" in the USA is and always has been a game for the rich, especially since the 1908s when Reagan and Thatcher decided that China should be the top dog in the world order.
People just want to live happily. Simple as that. TikTok gives a lot of people a feeling, a snippet, of a little bit of freedom and connection with others. All US media makes people fearful - FOX "news" is literally just fearmongering for boomers and their children who can't afford homes of their own. CNN and MSNBC is just fear mongering against boomers who watch FOX "news". Facebook/Meta/IG/WhatsApp is an extension of these fears into the virtual world and TikTok offers something better.
Jokes on the USA though. RedNOTE is gonna close the cultural divide between America and China and Americans will realize just how far the boomer generation and those who have been elected to uphold boomer beliefs really left younger/current generations behind.
China has won technologically and now begins the cultural victory.
I can foresee, sadly, that there will be an unnecessary loss of lives in the short term however for both the USA and BRICS nations. Hopefully I wind up being wrong.
TikTok is not some bastion of freedom, they did win with critical mass and a vastly superior algorithm. All media makes people fearful, you speak so highly of China but have you consumed mainland Chinese media before? It is like Fox on steroids, packed full with stories that paint China as the victor and America as a dangerous and silly country.
Calling a victory in technology is laughable, mainland manufacturing is incredible, one of the best in the world. Products in China have caught up and in some spaces exceeded western brands. China is still missing out on innovation in high-tech, thats why they have been caught so frequently trying to steal corporate secrets.
RedNOTE is not going to prove anything to americans except the disdain the Chinese have for Americans joining their social network and the level of censorship that exists in a mainland app.
It is like you are a propaganda machine and ironic enough it reads just like a mainland Chinese news article. If there was a conflict everyone would lose out. I am surprised anyone would foreshadow it. China unlike Russia seems to still think through the lens of economic interests, I suspect nobody in the current regime would want any type of conflict. While they may have a military its entirely untested both equipment and men.
It is only when a system is failing that it becomes susceptible to destruction by indifference.
You might have a point, though. With the new administration and its explicit focus on short term populism, it’s hard to stand up for anything.
Similar story with Huawei.
The politics of this are exactly the opposite of that you're saying. This is about restricting democratic rights.
Senator Mitt Romney put it very bluntly [0]:
> "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites - it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
Or maybe Mitt Romney is just another conspiracy theorist?
0. https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/05/06/senato...
The people who formulated the ban failed a few times previously, both because they couldn't gain enough political support to push it through and because it was legally shaky. The Gaza issue was what led to overwhelming support for a ban in the US Congress and Senate (as Romney says), and the ban was intentionally formulated in such a way as to try to legally sidestep the First Amendment question (in a highly dubious manner, but the SC isn't going to overrule Congress here).
> mentioning democratic rights for a CCP app is hilarious.
It's the most popular app in the United States. Calling it a "CCP app" is just braindead. Of course banning the most popular means of expression in a country because the people are expressing themselves in ways that political leaders disapprove of is anti-democratic.
I sympathize with you and agree the initial support definitely utilized the conflict in Gaza but it goes beyond the conflict and centers itself around the ability for the CCP to influence how the algorithm works. To not understand how much control the CCP has over mainland entities is surprising.
This completely depends on the company. There's no evidence that TikTok has been used as a Chinese propaganda vehicle, and the issue that led to TikTok being banned in the US was TikTok's refusal to bow to pressure to toe the line on Palestine/Israel. Unlike Facebook, TikTok did not suppress pro-Palestinian content, and that led to broad Congressional support for a ban.
You keep latching on this idea of Palestinian content. You do realize this is much larger than that conflict?
I have absolutely no direct line to them, never given them any kickbacks, and I visit the country once or twice a year.
I have no doubt that there are businesses that do have significant dealings with the CCP, I would never believe otherwise, but the idea that every company has to have a direct line to them is objectively untrue. I know many other people who also do business with China and its mostly the same story, none of us deal with the government and frankly I would be very uncomfortable if ever I had to.
It’s likely you have and didn’t know it. The “political officer” or otherwise-embedded party official often has another title or “non-official cover” as they say. Communist governments have operated this way since 1918.
The people pushing the ban say it's about Israel. Other Senators and Congresspeople say that's why they and their colleagues supported a ban. There were always some people who wanted to ban TikTok, but they were never able to get majority support in Congress until the issue of Israel came into play. Banning the most popular social media platform in the United States, a platform that more than half of Americans use, is a big deal.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn: "It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content"
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.: "We’ve seen TikTok used to downplay the Uyghur genocide, the status of Taiwan, and now Hamas terrorism"
And of course, Romney's explicit statement as well, when in context, it's actually far worse because it seems he is very concerned about lax fact checking on TikTok (which American social media platforms announced they are doing away with): https://xcancel.com/ggreenwald/status/1880979821901332773#m
I fundamentally disagree with all of these representatives. Americans are allowed to view all sides of every geopolitical issue and make up their own minds and vote according to their own beliefs. We should never ever be "shielded" from propaganda because we are smart enough to vote for and lead democracy, so we should be trusted as smart enough to ingest any geopolitical information existing in the world.
If 999/1000 tiktoks you see are of one particular viewpoint, you don't think the audience is going to draw specific conclusions? Our species now has mis-information tools that we couldn't have possibly imagined even just a decade ago. We're in the midst of a real struggle to work out how your average person can identify it. It's disheartening how little progress has been made in this area.
So what? If you watch InfoWars all day you'll also draw specific conclusions. If you watch PressTV all day you'll also draw specific conclusions. The point is that Americans can draw whatever conclusions they want, and that limiting info to only "approved" sources is authoritarian
Of all the social networks, Twitter is currently the most concerning, given the far-right sympathies and political connections of its owner.
Would you allow an unfriendly adversary to buy up your ports, critical infrastructure, and food/water supply, or would you block certain transactions in the name of national security?
People being convinced to change their countries geopolitical policies seems to me a perfectly legitimate thing to do in a democracy.
If the american people would like closer relations to china and vote accordingly that seems to me to be the whole point of democracy.
China engaging and supporting that is also a perfectly legitimate means of achieving its goals, no? Or would you prefer that instead of convincing the american people of that, they should instead bribe or coerce their politicians behind closed fdoors?