The NYTimes said that tens of thousands of Americans have died from Chinese-sourced fentanyl.
I don’t understand how American startups can take money from China, or how Google and others can work with them. They’re in a soft war with us, have a 100 year plan yet we’re all so naive.
This is one of the best summaries I've seen about democratic governments as they contrast to 'soft' totatalitarian countries like Russia and China. This is why we all want to live in democracies.
https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/contrasting-chinas-russias...
The operational differences, for all their practical implications, may be less important than the simple recognition that Beijing and Moscow both approach influence operations and active measures as a normal way of doing business. The United States approaches covert action as something distinct from the routine business of foreign policy, requiring special authorities and oversight or legal arguments over whether Title 10 or Title 50 applies. This is simply not the case for the contemporary Chinese or Russian states. They still bear the hallmarks of their totalitarian and Leninist pasts.*
I was going to comment on The Epoch Times and China Daily (two English language papers that are tools to run influence operations), but let's leave that one for another day and just recognize that we need real, honest, truth-seeking media to have a democracy, and democracies need to figure out how to deal with our new media environment that is penetrated by disinformation.
"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" -- still true 2400 years later.
Yes the Chinese government is engaged in all sorts of shady shit and human rights violations that they deserve being criticized for but drawing Fentanyl in is a very strange link. There are many reasons to not want to do business with China from dodgy enforcement, concerns about 'extra shifts' at factories producing authentic bootlegs, technology transfers, digital security being undermined by surveillance, and not wanting to enrich unethical forms of government.
Fentanyl being treated as malice brings to mind the farcical "Mexico as a hivemind" rhetoric about Mexico" sending" drugs and criminals into the United States. Mexico didn't send jack shit - individuals did so on their own accord because it made money. That is literally treating all of them as one individual and is so ridiculously racist that it looks satirical. It would be like claiming that Americans are all crazy and suicidal because JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald who was then shot by Jack Ruby.
The more likely reason is that the Party infamously only pays attention to their own problems when they start to threaten power or cause them to start lose face by being embarrassed in some way. Everywhere you'll find people willing to do shady things for a quick buck - the limit is only in what they can get away with.
Google investors and staff want money and don't care about what happens in 10 years.
They are not 'us' (in your sentence, I would imagine you might be referring to Americans)
Globalization makes everything more complicated.
This is what happens when people stop caring about their country and only about themselves.
"This is what happens when people stop caring about democratic governance and society, and care only about themselves."