Comment on US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users

• frauddogg@lemmygrad.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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  Yup, I’m saying it; and I’m not accepting debate on the topic from anglos. ‘Debating’ you and yours is kin to trying to debate a sinkhole. Empty air flung down an indifferent, almost-smug pit. Any way out from under your thumb is a good thing, and I pray I live to get to watch your system crumble under your impotent fingers.

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  • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You came here dude. I didn’t go to you to “debate”.

    I pray I get to see it crumble too. However, I’m not dillusional enough to think it’s just one thing that needs to crumble.

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    • frauddogg@lemmygrad.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You keep flooding my inbox with white bullshit like you know better than me, you’re trying to debate. I don’t debate the kinds of people John Brown would’ve shot.

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      • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Stop being a “debate bro” here and acting like you aren’t. You came here. You are not the one being flooded. Look at how many people are replying to me with the same crap every time.

        I didn’t sidestep US history at all. The US has racism literally written into its constitution. It was useful to those in power, but many have writting saying they thought it was wrong and evil and black people were fully people. They still used it. That’s worse than just racism. It’s pure evil.

        However, I’m not blinded by hatred over a certain group. China has an entire seperate internet ecosystem. Is it because of racism? China has a long history of racism too. Obviously it is not, and its about power and control. The same logic is true for the US. They’d do the same thing if it were Russian owned and Russia is primarily white like the US. Assuming it’s racism makes you ignore the actual issues.

        Now find a new thread to be a debate bro in. Leave me alone.

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• GarbageShoot@hexbear.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Explain how China having their own ecosystem is better

  This seems self-explanatory to me. The US will do whatever it can to instigate color revolution – having a record of doing so in the past, see Facebook being used for revolts in the Middle East – so having companies that ultimately need to answer to the Chinese government rather than the US one is better for national security. It’s also better for China’s own economic development to have domestic companies need to figure out how to make decent platforms.

  China has no such record of instigating revolts and historically is much more opposed to infringing on the sovereignty of UN members (except Vietnam angery ).

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  • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This seems self-explanatory to me. The US will do whatever it can to instigate color revolution – having a record of doing so in the past, see Facebook being used for revolts in the Middle East – so having companies that ultimately need to answer to the Chinese government rather than the US one is better for national security. It’s also better for China’s own economic development to have domestic companies need to figure out how to make decent platforms.

    Exactly. What they use it for doesn’t really matter, though implying China doesn’t use soft power to control nations is really dumb. They may not invade, but they constantly use and advance soft power to influence other nations. I’m not saying there’s anything particularly wrong with that as that’s what nations do. They do do it though.

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    • GarbageShoot@hexbear.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Your shrugging is incredibly annoying and disingenuous and “soft power” is being used to weasel completely illegitimate claims. Does China like doing soft power with its pop culture exports (such as they exist) and even the mere existence of platforms like AliExpress? Sure. Does a platform run more by western than China represent a threat by the latter to subvert the US? Not without actual substantiation.

      China’s interest in bilateralism is neither saintly nor even particularly based on being a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but the fact that it knows that it wins by playing the long game and giving itself time to develop, while its main enemy is perhaps the most effectively pugnacious in world history (contrast with a state like the DPRK that talks a lot of shit but ultimately isn’t getting into any new wars, just staying in the one it was founded under). China is averse to fomenting revolt in the US or elsewhere because it wants to undercut power politics and play to its strengths rather than those of its enemy. To do that, it has a reputation to uphold that it won’t imperil with some hail mary tiktok brainwashing scheme that would certainly fail if it even had the power to pull it off (and, again, tiktok is already run by parties who don’t take orders from China).

      The US isn’t doing this out of strategic interests against the platform inherently, it is doing it as some combination of a scapegoating kabuki theater and to pave the way for further protectionist policy by normalizing banning things just for being Chinese on a flimsy red scare pretext.

      I think you’ve already had this quote paraphrased to you, but I didn’t see it properly rendered, so here’s the original:

      Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.

      From the excellent essayist Roderic Day, “Why Marxism?”

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