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> Just make one rule for all.

This is the correct solution of winning the moral high ground.

What Russia has been doing for several decades (see Yuri Bezmenov [1]) is leveraging the "west's" inner discontent. Every time a Watergate or Snowden happens it's a gift to them. It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the narrative of the western nations as corrupt.

We're in a bind because the kind of medicine that would fight the even more sophisticated Chinese tactics now would also hurt our own corporations and agencies. But we must take it. Targeted advertising and domestic surveillance must go if our values are to survive in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenov

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while many struggles with the mental gymnastic, for me it has always been clear-cut. Government might be bad, and if they did bad, can we criticize it?

Did any harm come to Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Adam Driver for portraying real life events depicting US government in lesser light?

Can the same be said to Fan Bing Bing if she is to portray Li Wenliang in a movie? Or Viktor Bychkov playing Navalny in some sort of biopic produced by Russian production house?

I want more freedoms than just the ability to complain about not having freedom though.

America is more Brave New World than 1984; people can protest the government, but if that protest rarely overcomes the inertia of the status quo, does it even matter?

Yes of course it matters. Is it sufficient? Probably not. But it’s a substantial improvement over not being able to e.g. protest the government.

Anyway, our government isn’t designed to be steered by protest but by voting, which despite all its flaws does shift inertia.

> isn’t designed to be steered by protest but by voting

Even voting within states are completely rigged with gerrymandering and popular vote means nothing in national elections.

This is a disingenuous pattern of argument. You point out a known problem and then throw the baby out with the bath water. In this case, its clear voting does have some effect because seats are constantly changing parties, and parties fiercely compete for votes.

Other similar examples of this argument:

"Everyone knows taxes go to corrupt corporations, they are completely useless get rid of them"

"Everyone knows masks dont block 100% of airflow, theyre completely useless!"

> seats are constantly changing parties, and parties fiercely compete for votes

Possibly because those seats are worth money. I don't know that people competing for them means voting 'works' in any definitive fashion.

Princeton recently released a study (this one[1], I think?) that basically says as much: voting does very little.

1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

What seats are changing party? I live in California where my vote counts the least. Since I turned 18 every single election has sent a Democrat to Washington for both senate seats and my representative and president (though California doesn't have final say on that last one).

Currently, of those 4 seats, 3 are in their high 70s or even 80s and the 4th was appointed by the governor.

I'm in my 30s. My interests are either entirely not, or very very poorly represented in Washington.

Tell me again how my never missing an election has made a difference?

What seats are changing party: In November there are 50 tight races for house seats alone. The house and senate play a huge role in legislation so this election will have massive impact.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/...

Even if you live in WA/CA your vote still matters. At the federal level there are 4 elected positions, 14 at the state level, and more at a local level. There are also primaries, so even if your Governor is guaranteed to be a Democrat you can at least pick which one.

The people that do vote have an outsized impact because, like you, most Americans are too lazy to vote.

I clearly said in my comment that I've never missed an election.

I do also vote in primaries, those have typically gone opposite to how I voted, or else were a foregone landslide for my pick.

I also never implied I live in WA. Apparently you got confused because I spelled out the name of the capital city of this country.

Ah, apologies for misreading your comment.

I see your point that district style voting can feel pointless unless you you're in a swing district. I still think there are smaller positions you can influence over but I agree with you on that.

If voting doesn't matter, why do Republicans work so hard to prevent voting?

It depends on where you live. Some states your individual vote will not matter because the outcome has already been decided by the popularity of one party.

If you vote for the biggest offices and nothing else. There's a lot more on those ballots.

There is, and my vote will also not influence those based on where I live.

> voting

You cannot meaningfully vote in the US, you have two options that have similar fascist views of the rest of the world and are unlikely to change anything. That is a false choice, meant to lull the chooser into a false sense of agency.

Yep it’s an imperfect system. It’s dramatically better than a lot of others that have existed through history (including today) though.

It is simply wildly untrue to imply that the two major parties don’t hold opposing views on at least a few important topics or that voting doesn’t help determine which party holds the power to realize their worldview. There’s a lot of overlap and a lot of ineffectiveness but this does not make them the same.

I thought this was incredibly obvious, but when you are not inside the US it becomes a lot more clear that it's foreign policy or stance on human rights doesn't change. It doesn't matter who you have in charge. What US news reaches outside of the borders frankly also doesn't convince me it's the same clusterfuck year after year. It wasn't always like this - it's gotten a lot worse in the past twenty years that I've paid any attention to it.

How would you know if someone less famous got disappeared? How would you evaluate the claim from people who say they saw it happen?

> How would you know if someone less famous got disappeared?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

Almost everyone living in the US has some sort of record. They went to school, had friends, teachers, family, etc.

It's unlikely you wouldn't know someone has disappeared, especially if they were important enough that the government decided to illegally disappear them.

By reading and applying critical thinking in evaluating said material. Unless you are parroting the infamous FSB playbook of 'question everything it will muddies the truth'.

Tell that to Julien Assange (ducks).

>Government might be bad, and if they did bad, can we criticize it?

Assange rots in prison, Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment, FBI raids James O'Keefe and leaks his phone data to NYT (which he is suing), and to top it all we have a soviet-style shitshow trial directed by politicians in January 6th Committee.

Now, I will see some awesome mental gymnastics of people explaining how none of these things have any effect on freedom of speech.

> Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment

Given that Alex Jones has in the last 24 hours been found to be lying under oath repeatedly during his trial, since his lawyers accidentally gave a full digital copy of his phone to the prosecuting attorneys (which they were supposed to have done already during discovery, but did not), this may not be the most effective example.

It's a perfect example of how people are brainwashed to accept degradation of their basic speech and due process rights because powers that be found an example (a scapegoat, really) that's not sympathetic to the public.

I recall the debates around banning Jones from YouTube. It was "sold" as an unprecedented step to combat unprecedented violation of basic decency. And here were are a few years later, when simply mentioning some wrongthink words automatically demonetizes your videos, splatters them with warnings and even cuts live streams from air. People are banned from YouTube left and right (pun intended). It's the new normal and brave technologists who posed as defenders of "real" free speech are mostly rationalizing and cheering it on.

BTW, would you care to explain how something that happened in the last 24 hours is relevant to the issuance of default judgment that occurred in November last year?

the default judgment happened after 6 months of 'fuck around and find out' from Alex 'turn the frogs gay' Jones...

he putted around with blatant disregard for the trial and cries crocodile tears when he's found lying under oath during the damages hearing...

Alex 'you may be my neighbor but i'll eat your ass' jones is not some Bastian of freedom - he's a snake oil salesman profiting off other's pain and misery. selling 'real' pills his family makes.

He had due judgement - he had 6 months to do literally anything (He didn't raise a finger in this regard).

You don't 'not go to trial' by ignoring it... that's not how this works... not how any of this works.

BESIDES ALL THAT:

I agree with you: platforms are censoring people... that's in reaction to malicious (not just false - but intentionally crafted and designed to cause harm) information propagating through our social networks - mind viruses just like bulimia and anorexia that are shared socially - only far more potent: things like QAnnon.

information is spread not by how true it is - but by how sticky.

if malicious actors infect a network - besides censorship - the alternative is violence - either by inaction allowing the malicious mind virus to flourish - or by taking action against it.

We are in a brave new world - and we don't even know the tools we need to protect ourselves as a species from the existential threat of memetic viruses...

Maybe we just all need to stop sneezing our thoughts out onto the internet letting them congeal into this amalgamations of ideas that seem to have a life of their own.

the life status of biological viruses is suspect. I suspect viruses made of thoughts and memetic imagery can potentially reach agent-hood.

This kind of argument is a fundamental disagreement between "censorship can be ok" people vs not. Whose responsibility is it that the public is not tricked? Policy makers? Each individual person? etc

And books and movies are being or have been made about Assange and Alex from both sides with no repercussion. Case in point.

Here's another one: Show me a China documentary that outlines the overreaching adverse effect of state digital surveillance on China population. I can show you at least 5 docs on NSA and Snowden, produced by HBO / published by Harper Collins.

It's astounding how smoothly we went from "you can criticize the government" to "you can make a documentary about someone who criticized the government and got royally fucked". As if those two are the same thing.

To be fair, none of the examples you gave seem just like "criticizing the government," honestly. Snowden physically leaked a bunch of docs he agreed ahead of time would be a criminal offense to leak. I think what he did was the right thing to do and we should have said that whistleblower protections apply to people in his position, but I feel like that's a different problem?

> Alex Jones gets found guilty of defamation by default judgment

Civilly liable, not “guilty”, and how is that not his own fault?

Seems insane to me to undercut our own companies because a hostile foreign state is operating in our nation.

Kick out the hostile state. That's not hypocrisy.

That is only a problem if value profits of a few companies, that don't even pay that much of taxes, over your citizens. Unless, of course, FB and Co. are doing for the letter agencies what TikTok is doing for the Chinese. In which cade it never really was about the companies in the first place.

The comment chain you’re replying to is advocating for reigning in “our own” companies, regardless

Kicking out the hostile state solves the immediate threat from China. But what about threats from our own (current and/or future) government?

I find it fascinating how China is described as an hostile state when it's manufacturing the vast majority of our goods.

Are these two things inherently contradictory? They're currently flying missiles and threatening one of our allies. Can you interpret that as not a hostile enemy?

We can handle our own companies with regulations that reflect the fact they aren't owned by a hostile state. We need to be much much more restrictive with china and also restrict our companies ability to work with them when it comes to data and technology sales

Imagine in the current world that every other countries take the same approach and kick out that now hostile influence (basically banning Meta/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon). How would these companies look when limited to domestic market ? And is that really the world we want to live in ?

China and Russia already does this. Very few other nations have reason to, but if they want to pick between American, Chinese, or domestic websites they are free to do so and I'm confident the vast majority will pick American.

You don't need a "narrative" to describe western nations as corrupt.

All you need to do is look at wealth inequality over time:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Wealth_i...

Well, okay corrupt, but still capable of self-repair. meanwhile others have the corruption build into the very system of thiefdoms handed out to nobles.

Also there are quite alot of ideals at work, for example when it comes to free trade. Anybody can sell his product and ideas in the us, meanwhile alot of beligerents, have walled of their societies from free discours and sabotage any external market contenders.

Why do you think wealth inequality is an inherent sign of corruption?

Because wealth can be turned into power.

Because when power is unevenly distributed a few people can make boneheaded decisions that create misery for the many.

To point to the Russian experience the Tsar made the bad decision to take an odyssey the long way around Asia (and Africa for some ships) to attack Japan and they got their asses handed to them in a few hours. That was the first time Lenin and company tried a revolution and ultimately they made this feature film about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin

A few months back we had the spectacle of Elon Musk possibly buying Twitter (maybe he was in the running for asshole-in-chief) but I think he got some sense scared into him and he is keeping his head down these days.

Btw, you still didn't answer the question.

Yes wealth can be turned into power, but you know what already is power? Political power. Wealth is a counterpoint to political power. This is why communist systems become authoritarian, because there is no counterpoint to the power of the politburo. View xi’s crackdown on tech in China as a elimination of a potential competitor, just like his earlier corruption purges.

You push a narrative by including 'western' there. Non western nations also have tremendous wealth inequality.

You are also pushing a narrative. You can't ignore the basis of the hypocrisy of the west: the west purports to be better. You aren't just not doing better than the comment above, you're doing worse.

Show me please how wealth inequality implies corruption.

It's been studied quite a few times and links have been identified. Here is one from 2004.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_url?url=http://web.hks....

This particular study is just measuring correlation. Sorry, this doesn't count. We were talking about inequality CAUSING corruption.

How do you know that pointing out the ‘hypocrisy’ is the propaganda rather than the idea that these values as commonly understood have any basis in reality in the first place?

I think that's a fair objection. I don't know. But my lived experience in a family who have sacrificed a lot on the alter of democratic values leaves me with a strong bias for which I make no apologies.

People in my family have sacrificed meaningfully for these values as well, but I think it’s important to evaluate objectively whether those sacrifices are honored by the people who wield power or taken for granted.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...:

> But the picture changes markedly when all three independent variables are included in the multivariate Model 4 and are tested against each other. The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level. Clearly the median citizen or “median voter” at the heart of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy does not do well when put up against economic elites and organized interest groups. The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.

> […]

> When both interest groups and affluent Americans oppose a policy it has an even lower likelihood of being adopted (these proposed policies consist primarily of tax increases). At the other extreme, high levels of support among both interest groups and affluent Americans increases the probability of adopting a policy change, but a strong status quo bias remains evident.

It's easy to avoid the Bezmenov's "trap" (for a lack of better words). Avoid moralizing issues especially if it doesnt directly affect your core interests. Also acknowledge that indeed all nations do have skeleton in their cupboards, let's keep them hidden.

It's more than a narrative for sure.

> It exposes our 'hypocrisy', and failure to live up to our own democratic standards. That fuels the narrative of the western nations as corrupt.

I don't know why though. It should be clear by now that nobody in the west cares about hypocrisy, democracy, standards or corruption.

I care.

I do too, but statistically we are "nobody".

Given the lack of data, you might as well assume that you are not so special, and hence part of a statistically significant group.

I see the claim that nobody cares about democracy as another piece of right-wing propaganda.

This! It is propaganda designed to give you apathy. Ironically it only works because you are aware enough to know you want a better world.

A great many of us care, but are powerless in the face of the hypocrisy and corruption.

Where is it that you live that you fought and won the good fight so handily that you’re able to criticize us from afar?

Remember kids, propaganda doesn't need to convince you of anything to be successful, only to get you to believe in nothing. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” . The intention of 'what aboutism' is to get you to do nothing, especially to not speak up in support if you aren't sure. 'Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good'. Don't let doom posters like this one suck you into their world of apathy and hate. If someone says something that's goal appears to be negativity, hate, or apathy, they are toxic, do not rent them space in your head.

After action reports, critical evaluation with a goal towards improvement, great. Apathy, the world sucks, give up? F that.

In the 90s the USA had the developed world's worst infant mortality rates. But if you look at the way we gather our statistics, it is different from all other countries. Why? Because unlike others we didn't manipulate the metrics because it was more important to us to have actual data to help save/improve lives. So who sucks? Who is failing kids? The country who is willing to make itself look bad with the worst metrics so that it can change things, or those not honest enough to be willing to look bad or make self examination?

Yeah, America sucks, but it's 10x better than it was when I was a kid in the 70-80s, or most places I have traveled. I would rather have public suck that can be addressed than the general apathy that this poster has.

What a nice piece of creative writing. The internet truly is a wonderful place to let loose with one's imagination.

Do they still pay you guys 50 cents a post, or is it more these days?

Oh well, at least I'm paid.

It's entirely possible that you're living and working with a bunch of zeroes, and getting all of your information third hand. How many real people do you know well, one dozen? Two dozen? Maybe you could spend your time around better people.

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