Yes, and?
Does anyone think that China is just full of the warm fuzzies and wants us all to hold hands, make smores and sing kumbaya? They are every bit after power as the US is to hold onto it.
Not all states are equivalent.
The US is the hegemonic imperial core country (like the UK before it) and has been since the end of WWII, and even moreso since the end of Cold War I. The imperial core’s imperialism is driven by the monopoly stage of capitalism. The imperial core has been pillaging the Global South for the last 200+ years, including putting China through a century of humiliation. It caused WWI & WWII & Cold War I, and has now started Cold War II.
The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
The US has over 750 overseas military bases around the world, and is building more to further encircle China. It constantly has multiple regime change operations in play around the world.
But China is not a capitalist state and is not driven by the forces of monopoly capitalism. I think it has one anti-piracy base in Djibouti.
I'll look through your sources because they seem intersting but China is 100% a capitalist state. They ditched communism years ago and only kept the authoritarianism
If it’s a 100% capitalist state then why is it ensuring that its people can afford housing at the expense of the capitalists? CNBC this week: China's housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary
“We will scale up the building and supply of government-subsidized housing and improve the basic systems for commodity housing to meet people’s essential need for a home to live in and their different demands for better housing,” an English-language version of the report said.
Unlike Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over
The financial sector is the core of Democratic Party support, and the party leadership is loyal to its supporters. As President Obama told the bankers who worried that he might follow through on his campaign promises to write down mortgage debts to realistic market valuations in order to enable exploited junk-mortgage clients to remain in their homes, “I’m the only one between you [the bankers visiting the White House] and the mob with the pitchforks,” that is, his characterization of voters who believed his “hope and change” patter talk.
The Federal Reserve is just the cartel of the US private banks, whereas banking in China is predominantly state owned. The Chinese state both runs these banks and has fiat monetary sovereignty, so it’s not answerable to the capitalists like the US is.
Capitalist countries still have social programs mate. Unless you think Canada is a communist country because we have free healthcare? I suppose I could call it a mixed economy if it makes you feel better
On a side note, owning a home is culturally very different in China than in the western world. They have a massive housing bubble ongoing and its pretty wild. Look up China Ghost towns. Some insightful shit.
The imperial core countries affords those—notably deteriorating—social programs through the exploitation of the periphery countries, programs which the core does not allow the periphery to have. The global north working class paid for those concessions with our blood & sweat, though no one seems to remember, thanks to two red scares and a cold war. The purpose of FDR’s New Deal was to save capitalism from socialist threats, and the capitalists have spent the last fifty years chipping away at their New Deal concessions. Europe had its own, even stronger socialist movements, and their capitalists similarly ceded ground temporarily.
China escaped from the imperial core’s predation in the last century, and is still in the process of recovering from it.
United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
Despite over sixty years of imperial core-enforced sanctions, Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans.
Look up China Ghost towns.
I am familiar with them. Those were planned communities that were photographed after construction but before being populated. Perhaps there were some duds, I couldn’t say: researching every bit of US propaganda gish gallop isn’t my day job.
This Is What The World's Loneliest Metro Station Looks Like Today
China intentionally popped its housing bubble recently, and that’s why some capitalist real estate developers are going bankrupt, and China isn’t trying to save them because they’re capitalists.
Americans downvoting you, mad they are the bad guys.
Yeah it's sort of like accusing a presidential campaign of being "all about gaining political power". Of course that's the goal. That's not the metric by which you should judge its actions.
Are we acting like the US isn't the biggest surveillance state existing in all history?
So because there's one app they don't control the data on, we need to ban it? Sounds like the free market to me.
Large centralised social media platform should all be banned. I miss the times when all you had was forums hosted in someone's basement, the Internet was a better place. Short form video content is the worst of the bunch though.
Democrats have convinced themselves taking over TikTok is the solution to their problems, but the reality is that if Joe Biden signs this bill into law when he is already tanking in the polls, particularly with young voters, he will hand the election to Trump. The youth will not forgive a party that was so extreme it banned or hijacked their favourite platform to censor them in order to keep a genocide going.
Best line is at the end
Yikes, what a flawed set of premises.
" What if Canada did the same thing to the US? They did!"
No, they didn't. Canada tried to boost Canadian media presence on American streaming platforms.
Making sure gooby gets an international viewing is very different from transmitting information to an overtly hostile government known for cyber attacks on its international peers.
"The platform isn't a national security threat".
It's a fact that the app TikTok is based off of, Douyin, sends the private data of every user straight to bytedance, owned in powerful minority stake by the Chinese government and that tiktok did the same thing with US user data until they promised they stopped a couple years ago.
As of January 2024 however, whoops, US citizen data(names, birthdates, location) is still being sent back to bytedance: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-pledged-to-protect-u-s-data-1-5-billion-later-its-still-struggling-cbccf203?mod=followamazon
It's not some baseless concern, it's a national security consequence against data disclosures that were already carried out and have continued to this year despite assurances 2 years ago that data leaks to bytedance are not happening.
"Instrument of soft power"
Marvel movies becoming super popular internationally is an example of soft power. Gathering the personal information of users with a continuing precedent attacking US digital infrastructures and democratic institutions is not soft power, it is hostile statecraft.
I am not a proponent of monolithic tech companies nor am I particularly aligned against international competition in tech supremacy, but this ban isn't about theoretical cultural competition.
This tiktok ban is about the recent gathering of personal information that can be used to assess and attack digital infrastructures and electoral behaviors by entities that are continually attacking digital infrastructures and electoral processes, entities focused on consolidating power not within some international free market of soft cultural influence but by gathering and consolidating power and using that power to forward state ambitions.
Yes, I too would love the US president to decide which social media platforms I am allowed to legally use and who I can legally communicate with. I'm so scared China is going to, checks notes, influence my opinion that I'm willing to sacrifice my free speech rights in the process. Regulate me harder, daddy! 😍
It's actually Congress
I would find this all extremely concerning if China didn't regulate US platforms so heavily. For example, Tiktok has safety limitations for children in China while they have nothing at all for children in the US. It's being used as a social/mental health weapon.
Just remember that daddy allows you access to the propaganda that encourages defending Tiktok.
Finally, your speech has not been limited. You can take it to any of the competitors. There would be free speech concerns for Tiktok, but it's a Chinese company, not protected by the US constitution, and checks notes China proactively limits speech.
They didn't care about it being China owned
They didn't care about data sharing
Share info on the platform the US can't censor though and then it's ban time 😂
Has anybody actually read the bill?
The whole bill is about giving the government power to ban "foreign adversary controlled applications" and there's nothing about the president being able to ban whatever app they want.
The bill defines a foreign adversary as: "a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code":
The People's Republic of China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (China);
Republic of Cuba (Cuba);
Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran);
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea);
Russian Federation (Russia); and
Venezuelan politician Nicolás Maduro (Maduro Regime).
So unless you are on the side of the enemies of the US and want social media apps controlled by them, I don't know why you wouldn't support this bill.
Edit: I think the misunderstanding/misinformation comes from a few places, but ultimately I think it boils down to the fact the bill requires the app/platform to be a foreign adversary AND it requires a presidential executive order before the app will be banned.
Those are not my adversaries, they’re the adversaries of US military industrial-complex and the imperial core capitalists in general. One reason they’re a thorn in the capitalists’ side is that they’re unable to exploit them through neocolonialism.
What has Cuba done to me? The reason Cuba has been under an illegal, grinding embargo for sixty years is that they pose the threat of a good example to the capitalist class: Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans
unless you are on the side of the enemies of the US
You mean enemies of the US's ruling class of capitalists, who are the working class's allies.
"Your enemies are not our enemies." - Nelson Mandela (who, btw, was on the US terrorist list until 2013 and is/was an enemy of the US. Was Nelson Mandela your enemy?)
You like Russia? Why?
More accurate to say I support Russia's role in geopolitics — as any working class person should — because their interests are broadly aligned with the Global South's in ending the dictatorship that the US — and the Imperial core in general — has had on the rest of the world for the past century (it was mainly the UK before; it's been the US since WW2).
While much of the economic and social progress the USSR had made has been undone with its overthrow and forced privatization and capitalism, Russia's foreign interests have surprisingly remained in favour of the Global South (though unfortunately not as much; they stopped directly funding Vietnam, DPRK, and Palestinian resistance groups since it's not profitable for capitalists). They've consistently supported Syria and Venezuela's sovereignty against the US for example, and are a core part of BRICS.
Just curious what do you think of the invasion of Ukraine?
Btw, the USA is a flawed democracy but it's still a democracy compared to Russia and most of the countries you mentioned.
Also from your link to that weird wiki, why is Greenland not "the global north" when it's owned by Denmark?
An inevitable escalation in the war that started in 2014 with the US-backed fascist coup in Ukraine that goes against the interests and wishes of Eastern Ukrainians
and the subsequent killings of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine, like Donbas, DPR, and LPR, by the coup gov for resisting.
I don't support the invasion per se. In fact, its goal of suppressing fascism in western Ukraine seems to have kinda backfired from this after all, with the Ukraine gov using this as an excuse to suppress the left.
But the point is, what else could've they done? They’ve already tried to join NATO multiple times from even before the USSR’s overthrow and have been denied (since it's an imperialist org whose entire purpose is to suppress socialism globally, and particularly Russia) and they already had the Minsk agreements which the US sidelined through the coup. Not doing something about it would lead to the continued killing of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, and NATO getting even closer to Russia since the post-2014 US puppet gov doesn’t abide by the Minsk agreements.
I will never really understand why china's on these lists. I know it's because theyre communist and commies = bad, but every other country on their has literally vowed to kill Americans, while china's biggest crime is making close to as much money as we do.
china's biggest crime is making close to as much money as we do.
Nah man, I'm pretty sure the Tiananmen square massacre was a bigger crime. Not to mention their genocide of the Uighur people, their oppression of Hong Kong, their attempts to steal Taiwan's sovereignty.
ETA: big thanks to OP for so clearly and concisely showing they're a tankie.
Nice try CIA
I thought communism was bad because they want to censor our freedoms. So why is the freedoms censoring the comminsists?
The probability of a war between the US and China is very high as judged by the US military. Prominently over the Taiwan situation. Having service members with tiktok on their devices would be terrible for opsec. To me this confirms that we are continuing to track on that train of thought. With that line of thinking this seems to an increased likelihood. Be careful out there folks.
Just my thoughts...
I thought government employees were already banned from having TikTok on their devices. Does that not also apply to military personnel?
TikTok is banned from official devices, i.e. and phone provided by the DoD, etc. There is no ban on it being on a personal phone; just a strong recommendation against having the app.
The TikTok ban is The Patriot Act 2.0
No, that's massively downplaying the Patriot Act.
Not if it literally kills Open Source.
How is open source related to anything at all here?
Bans can be bypassed, but my concern is if the new law makes it criminal to use tiktok. If so, the media should stop saying "tiktok ban" and instead say "new law makes it a crime to use tiktok"
The platform isn't a national security threat, but a challenge to silicon valley's dominance
No, I'm pretty sure it's just both
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