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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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To jump off of this post downthread about the vibe shift around tech vs. the-rest-of-society, with the TikTok ban fast approaching, I have some thoughts to share:

Edit: Interestingly, RedNote apparently has zero geographical siloing, and the CCP has been quick to breathe down RedNote's neck about it.

TikTok isn't being banned due to "potentially spying on users".

I wish a little that it was about spying on users. I wish more that it was about how TikTok is the worst thing humans have ever created. Hypershortform content is gigafrying the developing brains of young people, and then there are the peculiarities of its content. TikTok text-to-speech, obnoxious subtitles on every video, five hundred thousand shitty clips to the same fucking 20 seconds of a song over and over and over, TikTok dances, splitscreen videos of Family Guy clips and Minecraft because attention spans have apparently become that bad. Adolescents are mainlining psychic polonium just from all of these, and that's before we consider the psychic demon core that is social media.

Spying on users would be a good enough reason. I don't know how people respond with "My government is spying on me." Yeah but it's our government. It's a different and in many ways a far grosser abuse of power but at least you can say there are legitimate reasons for the American government to keep data on American citizens. There is no conceivable above-board justification for the Chinese government creating-via-numerous-cyberattacks a general database of American citizens and its existence alone is grounds to ban them from all American telecommunications.

It was probably expedited to congress because of AIPAC but that was long after Trump tried to ban it and well after the Biden admin had it investigated and banned from government devices. It also must be said that however much congress and their AIPAC handlers get their hackles raised about Israel and JQ shit, the actual power in this country, the unelected bureaucracy, is clearly highly invested in righties wasting all their time posting about jews. Look no further than that preeminent JQ voice of Nick Fuentes being a fed.

Regardless of the actual motive, absolute justification for the ban is and has been the CCP having a tool to introduce political narratives in a social media platform used by a massive number of Americans. It's not Reddit or X where they have to work with shills and botting, it's not /pol/ where they spam slide threads and run psyops like they did at the onset of the coronavirus. It's a platform they control where they can push the figurative button and suddenly millions of people are seeing the exact content the CCP wants them to see. Google does that too, but I know their reasoning, why is 'based China' doing it? It's not because they're ideologically lockstep. It's because for the last decade they've been waging a next-generation war on the American people by destabilizing our politics. I still don't get how this has been missed, after a year of seeing commentators on the right making incredible snipes of nefarious deeds being snuck by the masses, only Sam Hyde has voiced a fraction of the animosity we need to exhibit toward China, which begins with expelling every single Chinese national in this country, and even he softened that with using it to frame a joke about honeydicking.

I feel very differently. I don't like China's government and I would hate to live in China, but at the same time, I definitely view the US government spying on me as being more dangerous than China spying on me. After all, I am a US citizen, so it is very unlikely that China would do anything to me no matter what kind of information they had on me. The US government, on the other hand, could do all sorts of things to me.

I mean, there's the "how sure are you that you are immune to tailored propaganda" issue and there's the "how sure are you that they can't figure out something to blackmail you with" issue. But those aren't the big points. The big points are:

  1. If the CPC says TikTok will be a malware vector, it will be a malware vector. A state-level malware vector, at that, which means zero-days and probably hardware/firmware backdoors (do you own any computing devices made in Mainland China?).
  2. You might not care about what the CPC knows about you, but what the CPC knows about the Chinese diaspora matters to you because knowing whether a given expat is toeing the party line is a key part of being able to control him by threatening his family, and you want there to be less enemy agents in the USA (there will be some anyway, but TikTok is more scalable).

Chinese families are small due to low TFR and chinamen make good immigrants- it is trivial to grant visas to all the clan of chinamen in the west whose enemy agent status actually matters.

That only solves the problem if both they want to come and the CPC lets them come. Obviously, by the point of them being explicitly hostages, the CPC wouldn't let them emigrate.

‘Chinese expats or their children being granted a security clearance or background checked for sensitive work are asked to provide a list of relatives who will immediately be granted visas upon completion of the process’ seems to solve the process- presumably the CCP isn’t preemptively taking hostages. It’s just when they need something. And these kinds of security checks already ask to disclose ties to foreign nationals and discriminate in otherwise unconstitutional ways- it’s not a huge stretch.

In any case, orientals in general seem to love America even before you get to the ‘totalitarian polluted and poor’ aspect of red China; I have a hard time imagining grandma and brother in law are passing up an opportunity to move and massively increase their standard of living.

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