Why is the US government as-is a rational actor to get behind? More of its citizens in prison than China, it’s citizens vote against supporting each other through universal healthcare, and education, it’s opioid peddling execs, scandal plagued business leadership makes Mad Men look like Leave it to Beaver. China did not set the US on this path. It’s all homegrown.
Let such exceptional and gritty people be. Get some popcorn. Front row seats to the end of society are waiting.
Why should the US government decide which apps free people download? Free people ostensibly have no obligation to government security concerns.
Assange, Snowden, Swartz. Migrant children in cages.
Along with the list in my original post, and recent history I was alive for that includes numerous other examples; US citizens and its politicians are bullies who ignore their own bullying.
Not saying “China good.” I’m saying “US bad.”
Isn’t this the very definition of whataboutism?
What would be a constructive approach to improving the situation?
Whataboutism is minimizing bad thing by highlighting other bad thing. “Look bad thing parity!”
Shooting someone because your friend shot someone else does not make what you did ok.
A constructive approach would be to build schools, hospitals, and other local social solutions to community vision rather than allowing outside agents to gambling for themselves with the outputs of our agency.
We flip out over the potential for waste in too many hospitals while binning laptops and phones every couple years to save Apple.
There will be literal waste to any human endeavor. What character do we want it to have? Empowering a party drug addicted rocket man filling us full of high minded bullshit about a future no one can predict or helping people exist how humans tend to exist; building communal ties that don’t expropriate wealth and agency for some distant power hording edgelord.
Do you see the possibility for a constructive approach which could address the situation with TikTok?
And, by extension, the toxic destructive influence of social media addiction, especially for youth?
The same was said by elders when DND and comic books came about. The same was said about the internet itself. About secularism and relinquishing maintenance of past spoken traditions of all flavors.
For an increasingly secular society to say “hey wait I meant we bin religion but not my profiteering!” is the height of hypocrisy.
The only past traditions of value are disabusing people their meatbag is more sacrosanct than another, and fighting like hell to improve equality of condition for all meatbags even if that costs some their figurative value whether measured in conviction to scripture or fiat currency.
That’s my two cents anyway. Relativity means reality is relative, and thus so too are individual motives given an individuals time spent close to specific information.
Like Julian Assange who will be locked up for life with no fair trail due to publishing raw war footage? Or is that different?
US "feed US users absolute nonsense".
It is almost like we keep getting an algorithmically improved media equivalent of a big mac each time we bring it up.
You are, naturally, right about that there is no distinction between TikTok, FB and others. It is all crap. Ideally, it would all just disappear.
Now, that is the hard part.
If China also fed its users nonsense, it wouldn't be a very useful weapon.
TikTok/Douyin is just as cringe over here in China too.
They feed US users absolute nonsense while restricting that for their own people.
It absolutely is a weapon that people need to take seriously.