More and more people just want the American Experiment to end already.

Is it time for another Color Revolution?

sniff’s glove

Ivermectin. I’d bet my life on it.

I keep them in my back pocke… glances down at non-existent legs OH NO!

“Brainwash” is used to refer to exactly the condition I was referencing: being led to believe falsehoods completely and wholly, through the control of information and repetition of said falsehoods.

It’s regularly abused to describe differences in opinion or deficits in trust. Case in point, evangelicals will fling it around regularly when arguing over the practice of teaching Evolution in high school. They’ll assert Biblical Infallibility and claim paleontology is a falsehood that children are indoctrinated into.

You get the same out of war time propaganda. Particularly out of the Korean War, when the Red Scare was particularly high pitched.

So should I suggest then that your use of the word is incorrect, as you’ve removed it from its context and used it to convey negative connotations that it didn’t originally hold?

Do as you please.

I found a certain irony in the poster using the term to describe what is functionally just a reflection on the author’s own dogmatic views. I thought the history of the term - itself deeply reflective of an entrenched adversarial worldview that brooked no rebuttal to the point of dropping thermonuclear devices on people who adhered to a different economic philosophy - helped illustrate that.

Apparently I was wrong. The dogged insistence that Chinese people are incapable of thinking for themselves in the aggregate, and only Taiwanese people are true free thinkers, is too deeply baked into the Lemmy zeitgeist.

I think I provided a pretty good example of proof

:-/

they all need to be curbed when it comes to data collection.

The problem with TikTok isn’t data collection, though. The stated concern of the US government is that TikTok may be used to inflict foreign influence (ie, Woke Mind Virus Communism).

That is, incidentally, why the flood of users to RedNote has been so funny. TikTok’s got a bunch of edgy western Zoomers doing “Did You Know Capitalism Is Bad Sometimes?” infographics in between dances. RedNote is just straight up “China Is The Best Country In The World” nature channel style hagiography.

The US pushed millions of Americans out of the frying pan and directly into the fire.

Hey now. China’s not short on money. This is the other big problem with America.

If Elon Musk was a black South African with a social media company interfering in our elections and sabotaging our national interests here and abroad, I assure you that it would also be in the crosshairs of a ban.

It’s not intentionally evil.

Idk, man. I can’t help notice that the city is in a smaller, poor, majority Hispanic region with bad state-level representation and a history of weak environmental protections.

It’s intentionally exploitative and callous of the very obvious outcomes of the policy. I’d consider that “evil” in the same way racing an F-350 through a dog park is “evil”.

Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

A public list of banned & quarantined subreddits

Very easy to hit your police quotas in a city where everyone is constantly committing crimes through basic commerce.

we know that there must be a monopoly on violence

We know what the alternative looks like. pops open a stack of history books on various civil wars

I am 100% personally for protections and social safety nets, a strong system to protect and enrich the lives of citizens so that they can be productive and have better outputs in the long run benefits all of us.

I think that’s an easy idea to sell at the top line. But as soon as you get into the messy details, you’re going to run into disputes between rival ideologues. And when tensions flare, resources run short, and people panic, those disputes can turn violent… resulting in civil war.

I would argue that the number one job of a state government is to avoid civil war. When you go back to the Spanish Civil War (every ideology nerd’s favorite bone to pick) and you talk about the various sides, their ideologues, and their relative successes, what you are ultimately asking is which faction was most successful in ending the war and reestablishing a peaceful order.

Anarchists and Communists love to bicker over who screwed over whom. But the dirty bottom line of it all is that Franco’s highly authoritarian bloody-handed military, backed by a host of private profit-motivated interests, brought an end to the chronically unstable Republican Era.

it’s generally cheaper to fix problems then let them fester and rot.

When you’re working with limited resources and you have a variety of stakeholders at play, which problems get fixed and which are ignored can often come down to which stakeholders can form a lasting functional coalition.

The problem with authoritarianism as a system of government is that it does a great job of placating a coalition of powerful patrons, stabilizing an erratic popular system through a campaign of military terror. You win the support of capital by making a region profitable. And then you’ve got a ahem “virtuous” self-reinforcing cycle of profits expanding the scale of resources afforded to the authoritarian state.

Minarchy might be attractive ideologically. But if the system can’t stave of domestic conflicts by placating powerful opposed interests, it isn’t a system people can participate in safely or sustainably. Nobody wants the job of Minarchist Government Official if they’re just going to be the whipping boys for popular discontent.

I stack my Renminbi in one closet and my SorosBux in another.

You’re just describing Reddit.

Proof of the value of looking beyond the most base layer of news.

The base layer of news is what shows up in fly-in chyrons an pop-up ads. Great to get under the fold, but its worth acknowledging how much of modern media is now just the front page of the New York Post.

Okay, but if you recognize genocide in Palestine, that’s just a vote for Donald Trump who is a Nazi.

That means recognizing genocide makes you a Nazi. Only by ignoring genocide, shutting up about 3rd parties, admitting China is worse, venerating Democrats as the only good party worthy of your vote, and apologizing for any kind of environmentalism that might cost us the election can you truly stand up for the people of Palestine.

And since Harris didn’t win, we know you broke these rules. The only reason you’d do that is if you secretly conspired to hand Donald Trump the election, because you’re a Nazi.

one is an (admittedly hugely influential) private company and the other is the actual single-party government

The US has been governed by public-private partnerships for centuries. Trying to draw a line between the industry administrators that get promoted into every crevice of public sector bureaucracy and the elected politicians who depart office to serve as lobbyists and board members of private firms is a fool’s errand.

Do we celebrate Chris Dodd the Senator and denounce Chris Dodd the chairman of and chief lobbyist for the MPAA? Do we applaud Hank Paulson the Treasury Secretary and denounce Hank Paulson the CEO of Goldman Sachs?

Americans seem to have no trouble drawing a straight line between Singapore-incorporated ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party. Why can’t they see the connection between Howard Lutnick or Linda McMahon or Betsy DeVos or Elaine Chao and the businesses they own and operate?

RedNote ToS includes provisions that require you to post “correct views on history, nationality, state, or culture”.

Damn that private company implementing Terms of Service to limit discourse to historically accurate topics of conversation. Now I’ll never get Wuhan Lableak blurbs and weird religious propaganda injected into my video feed.

I guess if you believe Taiwan should be “returned” to the mainland, Uhghurs deserve to be “re-educated” and enslaved, and that China is the natural and rightful pre-eminant global power…

I mean, what gives the US the right to encircle Taiwan with its Navy? Why were we so fervent in defending the right of Afghani teenager girls to obtain an education, but so cavalier in denying it to Uighur girls threatened by the same Islamic radicalism just on the other side of the Afghan/China border? How do we have US Senators and CENTCOM chiefs debating the best method for severing Chinese exports from the international markets, while asserting the threat of Chinese global supremacy?

It’s all upsidedown and backwards in America-World. If you want to talk about Chinese global hegemony, consider the methods at their disposal. To quote Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.

most people who aren’t into technology probably don’t know what the steam deck is

Idk about that. Steam is a wildly popular platform and regularly markets the SteamDeck to its user base.

One reason why finding a job is such a hassle. So many employers just want to interview people to hit a quota of “candidates reviewed” without taking any given candidate seriously.

You get a bunch of false positives in the search and waste time going through the motions with people who aren’t actually in charge of anything.

Straight out of college I had an eight hour interview process once, for an IT job that paid $25k starting. Round after round of quizes and queries that ate up my whole day.

Then I got picked up by a boutique medical IT firm a few weeks later after two calls and a 30 minute walk in, for nearly twice the salary. When I got the rejection letter from the first people six months later all I could do was laugh.