This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The proposed ban on TikTok annoys me although I have never used it. Since I live in the United States, the CCP cannot do anything to me anyway so why should I care if they spy on me? If anything, I should be at least somewhat more concerned about the NSA spying on me because unlike the CCP, the US government can actually do something to me. There is not even any valid national security justification. Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns. I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress. To me it just seems like an infringement of free speech and free association. If I want to use TikTok while knowing that the CCP is collecting my data, so what? The CCP is a horrific government according to my value system, but Americans help them a lot more already by buying their manufactured goods than by using TikTok. It is hard for me to understand this proposed ban as anything other than a symbolic gesture, a sign of the sometimes understated unity that exists between mainstream Democrats on the one hand and conservatives (Trumpists included) on the other when it comes to near everything other than culture war issues, a lashing out against all possible enemies of the Wolfowitz doctrine that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism if it issued from Russia or China. Should we not be better than Russia and China, though?
There is also the other angle of "won't somebody please think of the children?" But the moral fracas around the damage that social media is supposedly doing to children seems to me to have all the signs of a moral panic. Not because social media is not doing any damage to children, but because it is a slippery slope argument. There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child, and certainly there are plenty of peer groups that a child might be exposed to which would need to have no recourse to electronic communications to also do damage to that sensitive child, but the authentic liberal response is not censorship. There is something that I find unpleasant about the whole idea of viewing information or an information medium as inherently damaging. But then, I am a liberal. The way I see it, by all means if you find the CCP to be morally objectionable then do not buy their goods or use their services, but is this a restriction that the United States government should impose?
People stating their annoyance on internet as if anybody cares about what some anon is annoyed about is annoying. World is not here for you not to be annoyed.
CCP can do great deal of damage to you. For instance they can try to influence local politics in order to promote their agenda, which includes spyops and other clandestine operations. Additionally CCP indeed does influence local issues, including even opening their own police stations in foreign countries which were used to harass or kidnap enemies of CCP living abroad. As another example CCP runs various organizations under the broader umbrella of [United Front](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_front_(China)) with direct goal to promote its goals.
Sure, it is possible that banning TikTok can be one of the first steps to isolate CCP in international matters. It may even come to more broader sanctions on the level of current status with Russia but possibly also Iran or other countries. In a sense, striking at ability of CCP to influence politics abroad with tools like TikTok or other foreign influence campaigns is absolutely priority number one as these things directly target ability of USA to enact further defense measures.
CCP is morally objectionable but so are many other governments. The difference is that on top of that CCP under Xi Jinping is steadily becoming direct adversary of USA and many other countries including China's direct neighbors. That is the main reason for retaliation, banning propaganda arm of adversarial government is nobrainer to me in that sense.
More options
Context Copy link
For decades, one could not get a security clearance if one were homosexual. On the one hand this was a "natural" disgust reaction by those who hand out security clearances, but there was also a logic to it that went: I myself might not be homophobic, I might have all the goodwill in the world to homosexuals, but most people hate and despise homosexuality, so a homosexual simply has far too much blackmail material lying around waiting to get got by the damn Reds. You can't trust someone who has secrets that could be revealed to his family and embarrass him. It's too much to expect him to successfully keep this secret forever.
We've since moved past this, homosexuals are perfectly capable of getting security clearances, because exposing his homosexuality isn't going to qualify as blackmail in America in the Year of our Lord 2023. Who are you going to tell, his husband and the other guests at their wedding? We didn't make it ok to have Homos in security clearances by figuring out a way to reliably avoid their perversion getting detected by enemies, we simply decided that we didn't care about the perversion. Expose their sordid personal lives all you want, we knew they were sodomites when we hired them. We didn't prevent their exposure, we transcended the need to avoid exposure. We didn't end liberalism, we expanded it.
Now, as the proverb goes whose attribution I can't recall, there is almost no one alive whose sex life, if fully exposed to public ridicule, would not inspire revulsion and horror. And of course the modern sexual menu is like the Cheesecake Factory in its variety and artificiality. So we don't worry we'll be revealed as fags or fairies or sodomites or Saphists, but we worry about all kinds of other things. Are you some kind of fetishist? Furry? Pervert? BDSM? Like toys? Noncon? Wincest? Power relations? Raceplay? Like 'em a little on the young side? Messaging hot young hung bottoms on Insta? Just having a good old fashioned affair? All that and more is in your browser history for many people.
So TikTok offers a threat of blackmail. TikTok reflects back your own desires, it shows you what you like to see, what you look at. Some of that is various strategies to trick you into watching a video, but much of it is thirst traps. When I first downloaded the app to try it, it showed me some MILF bikini reveals, and while I'm not a regular porn user it's not like I'm not a fan of great tits. But, especially early on, watch a couple of them, pretty soon your feed is flooded with them. Keep watching them, and really who wouldn't keep watching them?, and pretty soon your TikTok app is just a softcore porn button. I didn't really like that, but to get rid of it I had to make a concerted effort to swipe past instantly every time I saw an attractive woman who might be about to take her dress off. If I were a little more interested, like a normal person, in seeing random breasts on a daily basis, I guess I wouldn't have done it. I'm happy to report that now I get nothing but Roman History, pictures of books, and Tedposting Indomitable Human Spirit Memes, along with a smattering of cutesy "I love you so much" poetry and Psycho Girl memes that have cross pollinated from my wife sharing things to me.
If I were a little more desperate, like so many in this alienated and anodyne age, I might be one of those simps who sends messages to thirst traps, who watches lives and sends "gifts" to get her to say your username, I'm sure there are even men who hire sex workers over TikTok though I have no first hand knowledge of it (certainly that happens on Reddit). Listening to Lex Friedman have Aella on his podcast, and feeling him gravitate towards her, I really appreciated the mindset of the simp for the first time. Aella's personality is tailor made to appeal to my autistic demographic in a way most professional thirst traps don't, and I could watch Lex's guard drop and sense his salivation over her. I thought to myself, especially in the altered state I was in at the time, there but for the grace of God go I, if I didn't get lucky and have the relationship I have with my wife, I could see how that kind of parasocial relationship could tempt a man.
And that's not even getting into the weird and socially frowned upon politics or CW issues one might find on TikTok. One could equally be exposed as a racist, a misogynist, a virulent hater of Christians/Jews/Muslims/Hindus/Blacks/Atheists/Baseball/America/France/Books/TV-Watchers/Weightlifters/Gays. And you don't see it because you set out to see it, you see a racist joke and you laugh at it because you find it funny, maybe you watch the video again, pretty soon you are flooded with racist joke videos, your whole feed is nothing but CoonTown, without ever making the conscious decision to set it up that way. TikTok caters to our basest desires, whether they be sexual or cultural, and our Id is not what we want exposed to the world.
The nightmare scenario isn't hard to picture: a politician rises who is a huge China Hawk, and then he is exposed by his TikTok, or threatened to be exposed, and his power is undermined. He was messaging Twink 18 year olds and buying them gifts during Lives, he was favoriting trashy negro jokes or Black nationalist rhetoric or antisemitism or whatever. ((Honestly, I'm surprised I haven't found out the sex toy habits or viewing history of politicians that publicly go after Amazon yet...)
But the solution isn't to abandon liberalism and ban TikTok, the solution as with homosexuality is to transcend our petty concern with the unimportant moral foibles that we all have but no one admits to. To quote Dan Savage who has written on the topic:
His theory a decade ago was that we would hit a similar point with sexting and leaked nudes, we will reach a point where everyone has them and so no one cares when they are revealed because we did it too. I would guess that a supermajority of sexually active people under the age of 35 have sent noods at some point in their lives, and better than that number have sent otherwise explicit texts waiting to be leaked. But we haven't seen acceptance of it.
The way we beat TikTok and every other spy ring foreign and domestic isn't by abandoning Liberalism, but by expanding it, by accepting and addressing that what our Id enjoys in a six second video doesn't say anything important about our moral worth. We're all doing it, why not just accept it. Fuck you, CCP, show everyone that I love MILFs with great asses or Twinks with great asses or racist toilet humor, it doesn't mean anything about how I do my job. I think we should have taken the same attitude to the damn balloon! The Joint Chiefs should have given a press conference where they said: China, Mr. Xi, Generals of the Red Army, if you have questions come ask us! We'll take you on a tour of all our military facilities, so you can see just how powerful the United States Armed Forces are, how thoroughly capable we are of crushing any threat on any notice. If the Chinese want aerial photography they can just take it from a sat photo anyway, why piss ourselves about a fucking balloon?
TLDR: Don't end the first amendment to fight blackmail, end a culture that shames normal people for liking things that normal people like.
I have a tiktok account following a handful of models I find attractive, but it doesn't seem to do anything with that info? I check in maybe once a month, scrolling without interacting, at first on purpose to see what it would show, but it never deviated from feeding me random content in english except adding random content in french, spanish, russian, etc, so now I have even less reason to interact.
I have been thoroughly unimpressed with its continued spaghetti against the wall approach so I imagine people must actively cooperate to get addicted to their feed.
Weird. I definitely scroll through and get some shit that it just kinda throws in there, but it also definitely follows my likes and time watched. If I watch a single video of SCP narrated cartoons twice, I'll get a dozen of them in the next 20 videos. Ditto "Keep Your Rifle By Your Side" memes.
Addiction I don't really see, though it's easy to get sucked into scrolling when I'm very stoned at the end of a long day, so maybe a lot of other people are closer to that mental state normally.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What if one of these people has a spouse or family member who doesn't work at a nuclear power plant, or for the military? You can spy on a person without spying on that particular person.
Seems like the sort of thing that could be added on to the already expansive SF86 20B.2 and 20B.6 questions. One amusing point of government efficiency in that DOE clearances use the same paperwork as the DOD so you get military and nuclear with one update.
Interrogator: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of
the Communist PartyTikTok?"More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is a pretty weak argument. The reality is that kids just don't engage with novels and poetry at any meaningful scale. Especially not now, but, in my opinion, not really ever--most people just aren't interested in that. On the other hand, while I have no evidence at hand, I would bet that multiple millions of American children spend more time on TikTok than on any other single activity, including sleep.
Kids being demoralized by the tens of millions by reading Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers is a bridge we can cross when or if we ever come to it. TikTok is the bridge we're facing right now, thus it seems perfectly sensible to me to dicsuss TikTok and not novels.
I find this to be supremely amusing, because in the country I grew up, this was in fact a mandatory reading in every single high school, as set by the Ministry of Education, which fixes the syllabus across the entire country.
I won't say that everyone actually reads the whole thing (I gave up halfway through, and skipped to the end to enjoy reading about how he offs himself, which was a consolation to me for suffering the first half), but the national equivalent of the SAT exam very much assumes your familiarity with this work. For example, in 2018, half a million of high schoolers were expected to read a fragment in which Werther recounts his meeting with Albert, during which he broke the first rule of gun safety (by putting it against his own head), and, based on this, and your knowledge of relations between Werther and Albert, write an essay describing potential causes of lack of mutual understanding between people.
Thanks for reminding me about it -- now, half a life later, I actually I want to reread it, to see if added life experience will change my perception of the work.
This isn't relegated to your country or a ministry of truth. Every student has had an educator they were convinced was going through life just to make his/her students as corrupt and miserable as said teacher was. And the students were generally correct.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
China essentially applies a blanket ban on US tech companies attempting to enter their market. Issues of privacy and national security aside, I have always felt that this is hugely unfair. While I wouldn’t support building up internet censorship capabilities to block Chinese websites I feel that ordering advertisers and tech companies to ban an app adds some much needed symmetry.
It seems like the US is actually fairly unique in not having laws regulating privacy and data collection for international parties. Europe has GDPR, which doesn't completely prevent US-based companies from gathering data, but does tightly control where that data can be kept and processed. That TikTok is the first case where US politicians have had to concern themselves is telling, but I'm not sure I'd be against a general rule about exporting unregulated domestic data.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm worried about this one. It has bipartisan support between (to my understanding) the pro-censorship wing of the left and the China hawk wing of the right. Both groups hold a lot of power in Washington. The powers the RESTRICT act grants are broad and vague and would extend far past simply banning TikTok were it to be passed.
There are four points generally put forward by proponents of banning the app. I'll try to address these as best as I can. If I'm missing or misrepresenting one, let me know. These points are:
TikTok is should be banned because it harms the attention spans of young people and acts as a bad influence purely as a social media platform, independent of any Chinese interference.
TikTok has the potential as Chinese social media to let the CCP use algorithms to promote harmful viewpoints among American users.
TikTok gives the CCP unprecedented ability to spy on us and collect blackmail on future leaders through user data.
The CCP is our (the USG's) enemy and we should block any gains in cultural, political, or material power they are making and with any means at our disposal.
To the first point. There's no accusation of poisoning our youth, ruining our attention spans, or breaking our minds you can level at TikTok that doesn't also apply to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, etc. All of them promote political extremism and use algorithms of varying complexity to feed users personalized content. TikTok is much better at creating a curated feed, but that's not for lack of trying on the part of its competitors.
An argument to ban TikTok for this reason is an argument to ban all of them. There are plenty of people who would YesChad at this, which is a fair position. I'm not on board with banning these sites for freedom of expression reasons, but they've caused a lot of genuine harm and are likely a net-negative on happiness overall. However, I don't think this is on the table regardless. The 1st Amendment will (rightfully) prevent the government from banning social media apps over this, and the RESTRICT act will only lead to a more regime-controlled version of them. Our lawmakers want to put social media more under government control, not ban it.
Also, if your politics are outside the American overton window, how exactly will you get your message out without social media? Would you believe the things you currently hold to be true if not for the narrative control the Internet has wrested from the government and legacy media? In the 20th century, there were only a few, tightly-controlled media companies that had any messaging power. Your worldview was constrained to what they, and the people around you, found acceptable.
Point two is the psyop potential we are giving the CCP. I'm not sure they have the competency to actually do anything meaningful to us, but it is a fair concern for the future. But what can they do to us that we haven't done to ourselves in the past 8 years, exactly? I believe this point is pushed disingenuously by censorious legislators to pass a law that will give them greater narrative control against their real enemy — domestic opposition, but I will go more into that further down.
Point three is that TikTok gives the CCP huge amounts of user data on Americans. This is a valid concern, and I can see the blackmail potential they would have on future leaders through leaking DMs, nudes, embarrassing old videos, etc. At the very least, I understand why we would want to block TikTok on the phones of anyone who works in the military or in a sensitive government position.
If your position is that no one should get to harvest our personal data, I support you and would like to see that privacy enshrined in law. If your position is that only China shouldn't get to do that… You may disagree with me on this, but as an entity, the CCP's ability to ruin my life seems much more... distant than the USG's. The current regime seems very interested in pointing the state at right-wingers. The linked press release describes the Biden administration's plans for dealing with domestic terrorism, with the outlined targets being white identity extremists and militia people. You may trust the Biden admin to fairly interpret the phrase "domestic terrorist," or trust our 3-letter agencies to not abuse their power or fabricate evidence, but the last few years have destroyed any trust I have in them.
Simply put, if I had to choose one state to get my data, I'd choose the CCP, simply because I'm a world away from them and have no power to break down my door should they desire to. They are not as much of a threat to my freedom or safety as the American government that views many of its citizens as domestic terror threats. I've no illusions about which country I'd actually want to live under, and the USG is not even in the same ballpark of political repression as the CCP, but that doesn't mean I trust my government with our data.
Point 4 is the China Hawk position many Republicans hold. The reasons for this are a combination of China's threat to U.S. hegemony, its desire to spread its politics and influence to client states, the desire to have a "common enemy" to reunite Americans on shared ground, and military-industrial complex-driven greed/warmongering.
This may be the position that gets the most pushback, but I just don't care about China. I don't want to spend more American money and lives on foreign conflicts when there is so much to work on domestically. I don't like the ideology and policies we are exporting to the rest of the world and don't want it to spread completely unopposed. I don't want to die in some "unifying" conflict across the world for a government that pushes domestic policies designed to economically and politically disenfranchise people who look like me. The USG has lost the Mandate of Heaven and it should focus on getting that back, rather than picking more fights abroad.
This is all before we get into what the RESTRICT act gives the government the power to do, which is a lot. It empowers the Secretary of Commerce and the President with the "authority to take any... action as necessary" against information and communications technology products and services that are deemed to be owned or controlled by foreign adversaries and present a national security act.
As I understand it, this would be a process that would require approval by committee, not congress, and lets the President or Secretary bypass 1st Amendment protections to move against any tech or social media company that they deemed to be foreign influenced. This would apply to social media, tech, crypto, etc., and gives these two individuals the power to go after any company they like at will after some procedural outcomes.
I've seen how freely the Russian Interference accusation is baselessly thrown around. It was used by our intelligence agencies to justify shutting down the Hunter Biden story in election time without any supporting evidence. I have no illusions about how this is going to be used, if the act is passed. It will give our government the power to do what it's wanted to for a long time: go after cryptocurrencies and enforce regime control on any platform it wants, free of the pesky constitutional freedoms that prevent it from doing so. It seems like a modern Patriot Act, or an updated Sedition Act of 1918.
I personally have the stance that we should not make things easy at all for China to fuck with us since they're clearly putting themselves into contention with us for superpower status, and I'm not very curious to see what the world will look like with China at the top. At the same time, though, as you note, this isn't worth singling out TikTok if for no other reason than it's not any more guilty than other social media services.
I would personally "restrict" all social media insofar as designating them as Common Carriers and implementing tougher privacy protections and better transparency, and if TikTok can't rise to that standard, then fuck 'em. Otherwise, as CCP-phobic as I may be, I will readily admit that this is rather unfair and clearly biased of The Powers That Be.
China won’t be at top. Power will be multi modal.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with this, and at this point, this is also how I feel about the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Sure, it sucks that Russia invaded them, and ideally they shouldn't have done that, but so what? If Ukraine falls, America is still separated from Russia by a continent and is completely secure. Russia has no reason to invade any NATO members, and if they did, that would be justification enough to annihilate them.
Poland and the Baltics are members of NATO and Russia has reason to invade them.
No, it doesn't. There are real and serious reasons for Russia's invasion of Ukraine that are simply not there for those other countries. I'm willing to bet 100 USD in monero, right now, that Russia does not invade Poland or the Baltics (with an exception for if they start attacking Russia) in the next two years.
Please expand on those real and serious reasons. If Russian aggression is to be limited to Ukraine, why attempt to stir unrest in Moldova? (Why leave Moldova out of your bet?) Why do senior Russian officials admit an intention to "denazify and demilitarize" Poland? Was it because Ukraine was leaning towards joining Nato? If so, the same calculus must surely apply to Finland, too: "Finland’s accession to Nato would have serious military and political repercussions.".
I won't take your bet, but that's only because the Russian armed forces have broken themselves against the Ukranians and are rapidly losing the strength necessary to pursue a campaign in the Baltics. I propose the following alternative conditional bet: If Russia takes Kyiv in the next three months, then Russia will invade another of its neighbors before 2033.
Russia believed that a Ukraine controlled by the US/NATO would be used to host nuclear missile interdiction systems which would give US officials the false belief that they could launch a nuclear first strike against Russia and avoid retaliation. The US has consistently violated their informal agreement to not expand NATO closer to Russia and interfered with the government of the Ukraine back in 2014. Crimea was an immensely, strategically important port for Russia that they could not afford to let fall into US hands. The Russian-speaking minorities in the Donbass being mistreated are a real reason but not a particularly serious one (lmao at the idea of the Russian government being a charitable, humanitarian body). Russia made it abundantly, overwhelming clear that they considered the expansion of NATO to their doorstep an existential threat - and they have acted in ways consistent with that belief.
If you don't think any of these reasons are real or serious, consider what would happen if these things took place on the US' doorstep: China starts making noise about the necessity of exporting communism around the world, freeing people from capitalist exploitation, and then their ambassador to Mexico provide support to a bunch of people protesting in Mexico city, taking photos and handing out food. A phonecall leaks out where the Chinese ambassador to Mexico says "Fuck the US" and then picks out their preferred candidate for President - who then actually gets the top job. Chinese military forces start showing up in Mexico to provide training and equipment, and there's talk about setting up anti missile systems in the area to protect against US aggression. Spots in Mexico with lots of english-speaking ethnic Americans (I don't think these actually exist but just imagine they do and the US cares about them) start getting shelled with artillery and discriminated against. Then, a major US military base/naval facility is told that they're no longer welcome in Mexico and the land they're built on will be repossessed. Afterwards, Mexico announces that they're going to join the SCO and start hosting Chinese military forces and equipment in large numbers right on US border.
Can you honestly claim with a straight face that this would not produce an apoplectic fit of rage from the US government? The actions which prompted the Cuban missile crisis are chump change compared to what the US has done in the Ukraine.
Unless you have a stronger source for those claims than "US intelligence" I'm going to just dismiss them as the same kind of fiction as the claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and sponsored 9/11, Iraqi soldiers removed babies from incubators in Kuwait, the NSA did not monitor domestic American phonecalls, Russia had compromising material on Trump, Crossfire-Hurricane didn't happen, Trump is about to be arrested, the Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, etc etc. Evidence-free assertions from US intelligence like that are demonstrably less reliable and more consistently wrong than Paul the Octopus' predictions of football results.
If you're taking Kadyrov's comments like that seriously then you would have had to take Wesley Clark's comments about invading Iran, Syria etc seriously as well (to say nothing of the crap that comes out of John Bolton). High-ranking military officials often make toothless threats like that for a variety of reasons.
From the article:
This isn't a threat to invade. This is a threat of economic sanctions and militarisation of the border - "corresponding symmetrical responses on our side" would only include invasion if Finland had also announced their plans to invade Russia... but I don't think that actually happened.
Because Jiro did not mention it. If he had said "Poland, the Baltics and Moldova are members of NATO and Russia has reason to invade them." I would have included it in the bet.
Your bet lasts for far more time and fails to include a provision about retaliation. I also have no desire to put some monero into escrow for an entire decade. I disagree with your thoughts on the Russian armed forces and their relative strength - but if you come up with a more reasonable wager I'll still take it.
I am pretty sure that USA invaded Syria, is there right now and bombed target in Iran recently. See https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/missile-attack-targets-us-base-east-syria-security-source-media-2023-03-24/
So yes, I treat it seriously that Russian leadership wants to attack Poland and they are not doing solely because that is infeasible, but would be happy to rerun 1939 and murder/rape/loot/conquer.
I think I missed USA bases on Russia-Ukraine border.
There was no such thing, and given that Russia happily violated formal agreements they would have no reason to complain.
You missed part that shelling targeted invading army.
I was referring to the "seven countries in seven years" comment. It didn't happen.
That's what Ukraine joining NATO would effectively entail.
Wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/12/russias-belief-in-nato-betrayal-and-why-it-matters-today
Can you please provide a source for the claim that Russia sent an invading army into Ukraine in 2014?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
‘Russia invading its neighbors’ is not exactly going out on a limb, but it seems to focus on picking off former parts of the Russian empire which are squalid and poor.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
More options
Context Copy link
This is a brush-off, not an answer.
Even if I bit the bullet that TikTok is only as bad as the worst US social media site, there's still an argument for US citizens preferring to not have it, because US sites are at least forced to be more responsive to US concerns.
Socially negligent and corrosive messages spread for profit are bad. It may be worse to have a peer rival doing the same thing to you for strategic reasons - presumably at moments pivotal to strategic competition.
Fair, I should have expanded on that point some more. The psyop potential isn't ideal, but you might have to pick your poison here. Under the proposed law, the loss in Chinese narrative control would just be replaced by unprecedented expansion of federal power to do the exact same thing. The Twitter Files made it clear that the feds found it in their interest to coerce social media platforms to enforce a narrative via implied threat of regulation. I'd rather not give them the power to ruin any tech company on their shitlist by having an unelected committee declare it to be a foreign asset.
I understand if you disagree on the value judgement here. I'm no CCP fan, but since I don't live there I'm less concerned about them than I am domestic government overreach. If your response is we should still ban TikTok, just not this way — how should we do that without massive increase in government power or curtailing our free speech?
All fair points. My personal take is that all these sites need more guardrails (e.g. Haidt's suggestion of an "internet age" to keep out young kids) but I'm not convinced that any of this will go past TikTok. Most likely outcome is they nuke TikTok and then everyone else continues to do the same thing. If that's what's going to happen then your concerns give me more pause.
I don't recall what specific incidents this is referring to - I guess I have to go back into the Twitter Files kerfuffle.
This is the main thrust of it from Matt Taibbi from his statement to congress this month. I don't know why they released the leaks as tweets; it's impossible to find specific receipts for these statements when they're broken up between 20 threads over several accounts...
By implied threat of regulation I mean the unsaid thing that would be on these companies' minds when they received a communication like this — what will they do to us if we refuse to comply? These requests weren't based off a legitimate court order, just the government saying "We'd really like it if you stopped this person from saying things we don't like." Right now they're doing the most they think they can get away with, ReportMaxxing and informal requests, so if given increased jurisdiction over content we have good reason to suspect what they'd immediately start doing with it.
Wasn't it part of the agreement that got them access to the internal data in the first place? A quid pro quo that benefits the platform. Taibbi does have an index of the threads with executive summaries on his news website/substack.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
tiktok is owned by bytedance. bytedance, as a chinese corporation, is de facto and de jure an arm of the chinese government. good enough reason to ban it.
hundreds of millions of americans using a chinese government controlled app where videos are artificially trended and allowed content adheres to sharply partisan ideology makes a ban demanded by reason. appeals to hypocrisy convince none but i can't not point out if the app were owned by a russian company it would have been banned-or-forced-sold during the trump admin.
as i hear it, congress has been asking a bunch of stupid questions about general privacy when they should be focusing on china, content policy, and controlling trending. maybe they have. i haven't looked.
you don't need all that to want it banned. tiktok's probably the worst thing ever invented. the only thing more purely and essentially cynical will be when we can hook a couple electrodes to our heads or plug a cable into our neck sockets and tell an app to make us feel whatever we want to feel. there are very few more wasteful uses of time, and there are no spiritually worse ways to spend time. viewing it with skepticism or distaste isn't a moral panic and it isn't at all comparable to works of fiction like novels with adult themes. social media is a truly unique harm. heavy users suffer the same kind of psychosocial radiation as people who live in big cities. parasocial relationships are very real and they're not just for people who fawn over actors, youtubers, instagram models and tiktokers, we experience it to a small degree with everybody we see in our social media networks. so we want to fit in, we want to be well-liked, and we can't help but compare ourselves with everyone else. for the developing mind in a community of effectively millions this is incredibly dangerous. spiking rates of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide can be blamed in part on burning years in fear of sarscov2, but the rest entirely on use of twitter, instagram, tiktok, and whatever else kids use now. every single kid who has a smart phone is walking around with the elephant's foot in their pocket and we're laughing at the people closest to doing anything about it. they deserve to be laughed at, i guess . . .
Meh. Twitter was, until Musk's takeover, de facto an arm of the US deep state. And they're not likely to be more benevolent than China, and they're a whole lot closer. I'd rather have foreign propaganda AND domestic propaganda (especially if it's clear which is which, which it is in this case) than just the domestic.
Really wouldn't be much of a loss per se if both of them were banned... but of course, the loss would be in creating a precedent of the government censorship. Like we don't have enough of it right now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Tangential, but there's been a massively successful anti-China propaganda effort in the United States since about 2014.
One piece of evidence: you use the abbreviation "CCP." That's not what they call themselves. In English, they say they're the Communist Part of China, or CPC.
You can also look back in newspaper archives and see the tone of coverage changing. Around 2014 the tone became increasingly negative, to the point where now it would be notable to see a news story on China display any positivity. Prior to then the dominant narrative was about wild economic growth, with a secondary narrative of "these foreigners are weird."
As others have already pointed out; this is bullshit. Ironically you’re the victim of CCP propaganda but got it confused
More options
Context Copy link
This whole CPC is just an attempt by CCP to influence search results and kind of have a "fresh start", trying to rebrand itself abroad. If anything it is the evidence of CCP manipulating public opinion in the West.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeh. Xi turns up in Britain as well around that time (in 2015) to general applause. In fact the largely pro Chinese sentiment continued to the start of trumps term, when he talked about bringing the jobs home it was to howls of derision. Then Biden comes to power and we’ve always been at war with East Asia.
I forgot about that, around this time we also had Xi Jinping visit Seattle. He stayed in the Westin and the hotel towers were lit up red to honor him.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a complicated topic to say the least. It seems to have arisen from a non-issue to an issue just as tensions between the US and China rose in 2020. (I'm reminded of the euphemism treadmill.) While the Chinese diaspora seems to prefer CPC, the English-language scholarly literature has long used CCP. Even the official media outlets of the Party seem to have no problem calling themselves the CCP occasionally (ex. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201710/27/WS5a0d0875a31061a738408157.html).
More options
Context Copy link
There definitely seems to be some bipartisan China-hawk rhetoric that picked up around then and hasn’t stopped. To steelman? the idea that it’s not a top-down propaganda campaign though, I think around then is when it became clear that China was no longer just a “developing country” that would inevitably become a liberal democracy as it got richer and become a client of the US through trade dependency, but an actual illiberal near-peer who wasn’t going to just fall in line with the US
More options
Context Copy link
I believe this to be true. Certainly it would be justified by China's bad behavior.
My question is, why is Chinese propaganda so bad? Considering how effective tiny Israel is at getting what it wants, China seems like it could do a decent job of manipulating U.S. politicians. But their efforts are clumsy and now both political parties are anti-China (one of the only areas they agree!).
Maybe China feels like it can just ignore the U.S., focus on peripheral allies, and gradually get what it wants through trade and the self-destruction of the U.S. empire due to the successor religion.
One explanation is that we're not the target audience of the PR.
The other explanation is a divergence in the hierarchy of values. For example, appealing to patriotism may work quite well for a lot of cultures, but will completely fall flat if the target audience is blue tribe coded. The PR attempts of a lot of countries that targeting a western audience completely fall prey to this, especially since they do not include all the required progressive shibboleths.
A counterexample of a non-western culture that has learnt to play this game is Extremist Islam. No matter how regressive the Islamic exceptionalism and double standards pushed, the figureheads know just the right words to use to pull at the heartstrings of progressives looking for an outlet for their white savior tendencies.
In general people do not understand that everyone does not think like them. In the US, you see it with progressives and the conservatives who seem to only succeed at preaching to the choir, though the progressives make up for this inability with a ruthless and relentless focus in subverting institutions.
Yeah, this makes sense to me. China could easily manipulate U.S. political opinion by equating all criticism of the CCP with racism and playing the victim card. It's certainly worked for others. The reason that they don't is because this doesn't play well with a Chinese audience, the only people they really care about.
I could be convinced that, whereas Westerners want to rule the whole world (or at least rule their minds and souls), China is content to merely rule over all ethnically Chinese people.
I agree that Western civilizations seem to have a tendency to proselytize their religion, be it Christianity or Progressivism which doesn't seem to be Beijing's modus operandi. But, I am not sure if the Chinese government would be satisfied with just ruling over ethnically Chinese people.
The reason for this is hard to explain since most of us do not have a good mental model of how the Chinese government or the average Chinese citizen thinks. Most Chinese discourse happens on Chinese platforms in Chinese languages far removed from the English internet. But Beijing does seem to want to throw its weight around if it feels it can get away with it, as we've seen in a few incidents in the South China Sea or the military incursions along the Indo-Tibetan border. Though, this may be a tendency of any emerging Hegemon. The US has done it. Russia could do it in the past, but not anymore. China feels it's missing out.
More options
Context Copy link
How does that square with Xianjiang, Tibet and the Sino-Vietnamese war? At least the other autonomous regions are majority Han even if they have significant non-Han populations. Inner Mongolia the odd one out but the history there gets complicated given Mongolia in general's relationship with Communism and the Sino-Soviet split.
Presumably it aligns with a view of history that all these areas are rightfully Chinese because they were ruled by China at some point in the past.
While I agree this makes little sense, we live in a world where all sorts of groups try to claim that land is "rightfully theirs" for exactly this reason.
That view of historical territorial sovereignty irrespective of ethnography directly contradicts your claim of "merely rule over all ethnically Chinese people". Those three regions/countries in particular are both historical and current examples of China ruling over non-Han peoples/countries. Regional hegemon seems the more appropriate motte to retreat to, since historical territorial sovereignty could be stretched as far as the Korean peninsula and even parts of Japan if one really wanted to abuse various proto-historic documents.
Yes, good points. I hereby retreat to "regional hegemon plus sovereignty over all Han Chinese people worldwide" but with no desire that non-Chinese people convert to Chinese belief systems.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
China wasn’t implemented by the U.S. and friends 75 years ago. Conversely, Israel didn’t spend 20 years fighting U.S. troops, followed by decades of economic and political competition. Also, there are a lot more Chinese.
It’s not the propaganda that’s making the difference.
Decades of economic competition? China barely registered for years on the radar. Its GDP was tiny.
Good point. I wonder if that has anything to do with the claimed inflection point around 2014, if that was when elites started to push back?
More options
Context Copy link
Not tiny compared with Israel.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Really? Can you imagine the US allowing the Soviet government to control US radio or TV stations that reached a 100 million Americans?
I have wondered what the bounds on the First Amendment are with respect to foreign nations establishing domestic "press." Presumably foreign nationals have freedom of speech in the US, but there is no need to allow actual enemy propaganda in wartime. Less formal adversarial relationships like the Cold War seem much more ambiguous, but I'm unaware of much relevant precedent.
You can still get your news from Russia today if you’d like, without using a VPN. And up until quite recently- and arguably even today- the US government has been far more focused on anti-Russia than anti-China.
Now I doubt that 100 million Americans are reading Russia today. But, honestly, that’s a difference in degree, not kind.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the problem you run into there is that there's a really high bar on proving that someone doesn't believe what they say. Even if it was propaganda, you'd have to prove that the person was consciouslly thinking along those lines to get legal action to take hold.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
While the USSR jammed the propaganda radio stations of the West, the West rarely jammed Radio Moscow. This included broadcasts that reached America.
This is a bad take. The number of hours spent by U.S citizens consuming TikTok is on the order of 1 million times greater than the hours spent listening to Radio Moscow. Not only that, the interactive nature of TikTok allows it to track your whereabouts and social network.
"Why are you against eating poop? You eat at restaurants. Don't you know that there are 5 parts per billion of poop in the average restaurant meal."
More options
Context Copy link
"Reaching America" is subtly yet very different from "reaching 100 million Americans". Is your contention that Radio Moscow was ever this popular?
It's an analogy to TikTok, which has a 100+ million users, so the relevant metric in my post is audience - not that a signal allegedly touched CONUS. It is a very different thing to broadcast a signal that anyone could theoretically listen in on, and one that people do, manifestly, listen in on.
For that matter, there's a difference between radio and a social media site that is vastly better at snooping and manipulating the public in a granular fashion. But that just goes back to my original point: if it wouldn't fly then...
That's not really the right comparison, though. How much TikTok content is actual CCP propaganda? Even if it's a lot, it doesn't really seem to be having much influence on people's opinions toward China.
How would we know what the effect (or intended effect) is? Perhaps the CCP wants to sway the election left, and their only thumb on the scale will be spreading pro-D get-out-the-vote videos on election day. Or perhaps they want to sway the election right. Perhaps they just want to keep Chinese citizens abroad from hearing about corruption at home, and all it takes is a thumb on the scale to keep China out of the minds of TikTok users. Perhaps the goal is intelligence collection rather than propaganda, and anything viral is fair play, as long as it gets data from the highest number of devices. Or perhaps the goal is the disintegration of Western Society, and all the inane influencer trends that go viral are centrally programmed so that the most inane and least productive ideas enter the largest number of impressionable young brains. It is even possible that they want to swing the opinions of the American electorate to be anti-China, so that the anti-China US turns into a bogeyman to distract from a stagnating domestic economy.
My point is that we have no way of knowing what the CCP propaganda goal (at any moment in time) would be and the algorithm is a black box (with different output for every user), so it is entirely impossible to see the broader effect the algorithm is having, let alone whether that effect is intended. The result is that anyone concerned about epistemic safety would support banning the black box.
I concede that the same concerns apply to other media companies, too. While I would argue that there is a qualitative difference between TikTok and domestic social media companies in that the owner and programmers of Facebook at least in theory lives in the same society as me and share some of my values, the ability to cause a partisan shift in voting rates or voting direction - by say 10% - is too large of a power to entrust to any black box controlled by a single entity. As they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That part's perfectly understandable, TikTok is utterly demonic. What's hard to understand is why all the other BigTech platforms aren't included in the ban.
Strategic imperative to compete with China is the only force strong enough to overcome neoliberal dogma.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why the fuck are people allowed to use any apps on their work-issued phones, or bring personal devices into sensitive locations? That's what you do when you have real national security concerns, so any concern about this is misplaced. War-gaming military units (and probably some real ones, too) get killed by even indirectly-location-aware dating apps all the time (and that's data China can easily access from American apps).
Major tech companies buy up every startup that could compete with them to shut them down, utterly fail to come up with a competitive product, mad that China beat them and now possesses the network effect power they tried so hard to build up over the last 20ish years.
News at 11.
The US already abuses its financial infrastructure to target things its government doesn't like (Operation Choke Point) in both foreign and domestic markets. Sure, they don't directly jam Radio Moscow; but they're more than happy to make sure anyone who makes a radio capable of receiving the band on which they transmit can't get paid. I think that's the same thing in intent and consequence- it's only surprising now because this time it's more overt.
Social media is not doing any damage to children by itself. What it does do is amplify problems inherent to/emergent from how we treat them- so if high school is some highly-age-segregated hellscape where petty bullshit is the only thing that matters in life, social media means that its power structure comes home with you and follows you wherever you go. (This isn't unique to high schoolers; it's also why most people are aware of progressive thought despite not personally knowing anyone who is.)
It's not surprising most people just want to treat the symptom, or confuse the symptom for the root cause. (No shit they're mentally ill; we're actively causing it.) Hard to get someone to understand something when their socioeconomic standing is a reward for not understanding it.
How would you suggest we fix high school? Integrate different age groups or somehow force things other than social status to be popular?
It isn’t as easy as it seems.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The ban is pretty simple. American tech firms are packed with NSA spyware and the rise of Chinese tech makes it harder to have complete access to tech company's servers. It is blatantly obvious that the anti China rhetoric is disingenuous. The same neocons who gladly bombed half a dozen middle eastern countries and are more radically Zionist than most Israelis pretend to care about Muslims in China. Muslims in Bahrain don't matter, and if they are near a Libyan oil field, they don't matter. The same people who promote a surveillance state in the west seem to care about personal integrity for the first time in their lives for Chinese citizens.
They have started with the conclusion, China bad, and they invent reasons for it.
Personally, I see no reason to be more loyal to globalist elites who hate everything western over Chinese elites who are at worst neutral toward the west.
this is actually true. i know there is a third party framework that is installed in a lot of popular apps in iOS that could be used to deliver zero day exploits targeted at individual users. one of the co-founders of the company had a senior position in the DoD. the only reason i don't think this is such a big deal is because anyone who has access to such exploits could probably just find/buy exploits for safari in order to deliver it so the infrastructure is not that useful. also, i'm not sure how it is deployed at customer sites. the framework interacts with software running under the customer's control but i'm not sure if the software is capable of calling back home or not. it could be that the software is run completely firewalled off in the customer's data center in which case it would be difficult to use as an attack vector because the 'attacks' would need to be pushed as software updates.
More options
Context Copy link
I've found that Chinese college students tend to be more familiar with Western history and philosophy than American college students.
They'll also tell you that strict Communism fails due to human nature.
China doesn't seem communist outside of rhetoric and flags. They have low taxes, many of their social policies would be considered extreme right in the west. They are pretty hard on gun laws, but this seems to be more of an Asian thing than a uniquely Chinese communist thing.
On the other hand, state atheism, giant government monopolies, strong history of collectivization and a high degree of central control.
They clearly have a lot of features in common with eg Russia as a society shaped by communism, even though their rhetoric is completely different.
More options
Context Copy link
Their attempts to control tech and billionaires would count as hard left in the West (though tbh right-authoritarians may also take similar steps - at least against colorful figures like Jack Ma)
More options
Context Copy link
That may be less true than you think, at least when it comes to the beliefs of China's leaders.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I generally agree with the 2nd paragraph. The 1st one, though, I think there is enough national security justification to ban private companies from publishing apps that send data about the nation's citizens to a different nation's government to at least investigate it. I don't know enough about the inner workings of TikTok to have an opinion on if a TikTok ban would be justified under such reasoning.
Circling back to the 2nd paragraph, I agree that this isn't the role of the government, even if TikTok were rotting our children's brains with its addicting content and such. It's ultimately the responsibility of the individual or of their adult guardians not to fall for the app's siren's song, and the government has no business censoring it. At best, I could see an argument for age restrictions like for tobacco or alcohol (or, as is the case in more and more states, marijuana), if there is enough scientific evidence for the harms it can do to developing brains.
Now, I'm not sure how much scientific evidence would be enough to convince me, though. I would like it if more resources were devoted into researching this, given that there are at least signs that it's harmful. And to combine the 2 issues, I've heard that China itself censors certain content for children on its own local TikTok which are allowed in international TikTok, like certain vapid/borderline obscene content. Presumably the idea is to help to prevent rotting their kids' brains while letting kids of other countries rot theirs, hopefully to help China gain advantage in various international contexts as the children grow up to be adults running the next generation. I'm skeptical of the strength of this, and even if it were true, the liberal in me says that if letting American kids watch TikTok means America falls behind China on the international stage, then so be it, at least we didn't encroach upon our citizens' freedom on the way, but it does seem a serious enough thing to consider that I'd like to see much more research into it.
The thing that bugs me most about proposed Tiktok bans is that nobody seems to even have asked China to give us the benign version that encourages kids to watch science videos or whatever they have domestically. How can we complain about them poisoning the rest of the world when we don't even ask for the poison-free version?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link