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purpleblue

Does China allow Instagram and Facebook in the country?

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Do you want your government to behave the same way as the CCP?

I would like them to treat the CCP as a malicious entity.

Yes. If they launch a missile, send a missile back.

And if they round up and arrest political and religious dissidents, we should do the same? We can't lose the repression arms race to China, after all...

Firing a missile is an external action. This is not an external question, this is a question of domestic information policy. It's hypocritical for a nation championing free speech to have a restrictive domestic information policy.

Economic sanctions is an external action. Tariffs are a thing that exist. It's not by any means "repression", so please don't make the argument lame by taking it there.

I'm pretty sure you were the one who took the argument into this direction, by equating banning a chat app to launching missiles - waging war.

I'm not asking us to hold ourselves to China's standards - that's the lowest bar in the universe. I'm asking us to hold ourselves to our own standards.

War is not repression. It is unfortunate but often the only sensible approach when the other party is aggressor. It’s not oppression to respond in kind. It is common sense.

> It is unfortunate but often the only sensible approach when the other party is aggressor.

How exactly is China banning an app in its domestic market aggression?

You have a very strange definition of aggression.

Just because your enemy wears heavy armor doesn't mean you should be naked.

Yes. China has walled itself off economically, preventing American companies from making money in China. It's pretty crazy for the US to let the CCP run rampant in the US and compete against American companies when American companies don't have that same right in China.

I think we should definitely ban Bytedance and all Chinese companies until China opens up their economy to the US. I hate Trump and was against a lot but I supported tariffs against Chinese products.

It's Great (Fire) Walled

right, so tit for tat was I'm pretty the GP's point

"It's bigger in Texas"

They aren’t per se banned but they don’t implement censorship and account identification rules that China requires of all social media so are blocked.

No, but it has allowed $9bn in Texas pension fund dollars to flow into Tencent and Alibaba, companies heavily involved in churning through all that sweet, sweet US user data.

Follow the money. This is political point scoring at its most brazen.

> Yet through Texas’ seven public pension funds, which are fueled primarily by contributions from members but are guaranteed and backed by state taxpayer dollars, $9.12 billion is invested in companies in China, based on a Hearst Newspapers analysis of figures provided by the seven funds — representing a multi-billion dollar bet in the success of the Communist country’s economy.

https://www.expressnews.com/news/legislature/article/Texas-i...

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