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Comment by nineplay | Hacker News Reader

It's the conspiracy theory I 100% believe in. I don't think the reason to ban TikTok is that it gathers information, I think the reason to ban it is that its ranking algorithm is deliberately destructive. Maybe it's a coincidence that all the dangerous stunts and vandalism "pranks" come from TikTok and not Meta and Twitter, but I don't buy it.

I'm leftist liberal and I have no particular paranoia about China, but I'm not going to pretend that we are besties

Edit: I won't remove the classification of myself as "leftist liberal" because it would make some of the replies to my comment confusing. I will apologize for it because it has derailed the discussion of China and TikTok. In the future I'll be more specific and avoid labels that no two people can agree on.

Suffice to say that I don't believe China deliberately created and released Covid.

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> I'm a completely leftist liberal

I'm confused. Do you think the CPP is liberal? It's very authoritarian.

How are you under the impression OP that thinks the CPP is liberal??

Maybe they're a LLM and got confused by the keyword "conspiracy theory" and the double negative in the statement.

Shhh

I'm not the OP, but I read that qualification as meaning "I'm not some right-wing nutter that's paranoid about Red Danger, and I don't believe everything mainstream media tells me".

I blame the broken ass left/right political spectrum that's so popular in the U.S.

Liberal != Leftist

And neither a leftist nor a liberal has to answer for Communist China. Nor do you gain any special "objectivity" about China by being either one.

The left/right view of the political spectrum doesn’t accurately characterise politics anywhere. Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense. The only generalisation I think reliably separates left/right is the level of government intervention, in both economic and social issues, that they ideologically support. But I don’t think that translates very well into the level of intervention they end up implementing. That also doesn’t really relate very well to the actual core ideas of liberalism or conservatism. But that’s messed up everywhere. It’s only that most of the world generally pays attention to US politics.

> Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense.

There is an interesting case made[1] that while this used to be true, it is actually not the case any more and that things are starting to become rather anti-liberal on both sides of the political spectrum.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...

I’m not sure I buy that argument. When I was a kid I remember we had the PMRC, panic over violence in video games, and endless debates over a different flavour of “political correctness”. They purveyors of moral panic has a different cast today (on both sides of the political spectrum), but I don’t really buy into this “everything is worse than it used to be” idea. I guess government encroachment on civil liberties tends to only head in one direction, but I’m not sure that’s the topic of the book?

I think the biggest change is that a lot of people just came out of an era where there was a national media narrative that was highly agreed upon and very New England, classically "liberal". Except around sex and drugs of course.

This narrative dominated TV, print and to a lesser extent radio. It really created the notion in people's heads that this narrow band was really what people thought about. What people are reacting to in large part is the newly visible presence of alternative perspectives. They were always there. They were just strategically locked out by people who decided what was "fringe". Basically anything that didn't support institutions was ignored or disparaged.

Waco and Cuba are two prime examples. Waco was written off in the national media because the people in the compound were so "weird". And for years the national media has underwritten the American foreign policy blob's almost neurotic fixation with Cuba.

The argument put forward in the book is that the extreme polarisation is in fact quite new, and that it has lead to a situation where extreme, anti-liberal ideologies, has been given more room to act within their respective communities and been given power to punish non-believers into submission and suppress free speech. Creating a form of vicious spiral.

A quote from the page I was just reading:

> “When Speech First brought a lawsuit against Michigan, alleging that their bias response teams were unconstitutional and “flagrantly violate the First Amendment,” the court agreed, ruling against the school. As of 2022, 456 U.S. colleges⬥ have bias response teams (almost double the 2017 total of 232),49 and very few have been subject to investigations like the one at Michigan.”

Excerpt From What's Our Problem? Tim Urban https://books.apple.com/se/book/whats-our-problem/id64456422... This material may be protected by copyright.

The term for this is "neoliberal." Classical liberalism birthed the Gilded Age and the series of economic failures that gave rise to communism and WW2. Neoliberalism encompasses a series of ongoing experiments with micromanaging economic tendencies. It will most likely die an even worse death than classical liberalism.

> Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense.

Wrong. They are neoliberal, not classically liberal.

Classical liberalism (belief in naturalistic free market economics) failed in the 20th century and neoliberalism took its place, characterized by top-down micromanagement of economic ecosystem.

In other words, classical liberalism insists markets will thrive only when left to their own devices. Neoliberalism insists markets will thrive only when managed by competent administrators (see Federal Reserve).

There's a difference between recognizing that China has a political structure I don't like and the "everything China bad" red scare bullshit that is going on.

The US is plenty authoritarian and China becoming a democracy wouldn't actually change any of the things that people are paranoid about. The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers.

Taken as a single political entity on the national stage China is just USA but in italics. It makes total sense that we would be uneasy in the US but that unease is how everyone not in the US feels about us. The unwavering belief that we're the good guys leads us to project our military might much more freely which doesn't exactly make us popular.

It is crazy that TikTok being a Chinese based company is obviously some ploy to undermine the US while in reality the CCP just forced TikTok to change their algorithm to be educational in China where such a thing wouldn't fly in the US because of the first amendment. China's video game ban for under-18s operates on the same principal.

> The state mucking around in private industry to achieve political and national security goals and wage information warefare is as American as hamburgers.

Ludicrous false equivalency.

The USA doesn’t have laws preventing its citizens from criticizing the government, nor are its corporations required by law to participate in policing speech.

This is the reason why criticism of China is so muted.

I agree with you. I think America's system overall has more popular accountability in who holds power but "the foreign policy blob" does a very good job of diffusing that popular accountability in foreign matters.

In contemporary American politics, "liberal" and "authoritarian" are often overlapping categories.

The two-party system makes for all sorts of weird alliances of distinct groups getting lumped together- there's really no reason that one's opinions on gun rights should be related to one's opinions on energy policy, or why one's opinion on abortion should be related to one's opinion on foreign affairs policy, but with two parties all these separate issues get grouped into two camps associated with either "Republican" or "Democrat" and then in turn everything "Republican" can also be called "Conservative" or "Right-Wing" and everything "Democrat" can also be called "Liberal" or "Left-Wing".

Using some academic definition of what "liberal" or "right-wing" or whatever meant in Europe in the 1890s or 1930s doesn't really work in popular English-language media today.

I'm amazed at how people will happily (enough) coalesce into two parties and align their views accordingly. Maybe it's just an exercise in dimensionality reduction.

It's hard to get anything done without a majority coalition. The two party system endures due to quirks of our election design that the two parties themselves are both very happy to keep in place (any change to elections that would make 3rd parties viable would cause the two current parties to lose some power).

> quirks

Winner-takes-all popular elections have proven to be naive, but I wouldn't say it's a quirk. It's probably the first election format you'd try.

My point wasn't that you need a coalition as much as that people will change their views to align with their coalition.

Liberalism is just authoritarianism with a lot of competing authorities. My American workplace is 100% authoritarian.

It is not unreasonable to believe in conspiracy theories involving China, because they have a centralized, authoritarian government, which means that true conspiracies occur frequently, and are mandated by the government.

"Centralized, authoritarian government" is a tautology.

USA has Hollywood, Super Bowl, and the NRA, and yet people clutch pearls when Americans get shown violent debauchery through a specific social media app. Totally unserious. These are parts of our culture that aren't necessarily universal (i.e. that would be reflected on Douyin).

On the last bit... I don't believe they deliberately created and released it, I do believe it was likely a lab leak, and likely negligence. There were a few similar protocol breaches with sensitive materials the prior two years. I also do think that any knowledge to be had was covered up for political reasons. Deny and cover-up, it's what major governments do.

I do think that through malice or neglegence, that tiktok's algorithm is harmful to children.

> leftist liberal

That's an oxymoron.

"Liberal" is an oxymoron. The social contract is not optional. We agree to be bound by rules because we prefer it to being by force, which is the default. Security is liberty, in the optimization sense.

I think the Americanism for that would be Progressive

No it's not, because personal politics aren't pure embodiments of monolithic ideologies. It's a shorthand for a political perspective that incorporates aspects of both liberalism and leftism.

>leftist liberal American political discourse is so messed up because people will gladly sit two contradictory ideas into one.

"I'm a completely leftist liberal, therefore I don't have any particular paranoia about China" is a type error. China is an autocracy, with a track record of doing things that warrant paranoia.

I don't really care what you mean by leftist, but you definitely cannot claim to be a liberal and have no "paranoia" about China.

There's a scale I suppose. Paranoia is "China deliberately created and released Covid". My non-paranoid opinion is that China is a large and powerful country which has complete control over its citizens and companies and very much wants the US out of its hair so that it can take over large chunks of Asia with no pushback.

OP meant left in contrast to right-wing Americans, who typically espouse a more anti-China worldview.

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