That such bans don't include domestic companies spying on people and providing that data to domestic entities says everything about how bankrupt this whole thing is.
An ad targeted at "young democrats" and sending targeted emails to "young democrats" has the same effect (one could argue that the ad would be more effective since it's less easily filtered out)
Judging by their positions and actions, they don't hate government at all. They love government. They just hate it when government doesn't enthusiastically support what they want.
Elected GOP officials are a completely different beast from much of their own base.
You wouldn't be able to get Republican support for reducing the power of federal law enforcement even if Joe Biden died and Kamala Harris became president. Maybe their paranoia would get sufficiently revived if they were facing a President-Elect AOC in 2024... but I'd rather not think about how they would behave under those circumstances.
The US has many problems, but I'd still rather live in its admittedly somewhat rough approximation to transparent liberal democracy than under a completely and explicitly unaccountable regime like the Chinese Communist Party.
It would be foolish to allow the CCP to abuse our liberal values in a way which undermines the security upon which liberal society depends.
I disagree. I think they're both roughly equally as bad.
> I'd still rather live in its admittedly somewhat rough approximation to transparent liberal democracy
Me too! I'm not sure what the relevance of that is, though.
Also I find it funny to the point of parody that China is the country under an unaccountable regime when they are signatories to the Hague System. The United States and Russian Federation are not, and the US goes so far as to have an affectionately nicknamed "Hague invasion clause".
In my lifetime the US has invaded several countries and replaced their democracies with friendlier governments. I'm not sure how we get to stand on any moral high horse about "liberal values". I'm not sure how leaving Libya with open-air slave markets is reconciled under said values.
I hope one day people can look at their own governments more critically than foreign ones, not least because our own government is at least on paper allowed to exist via consent of the governed.
CCP has extraterritorial police stations that regularly surveil the Chinese diaspora and have sent agents to assault individuals. It's particularly bad for expats with domestic families, expats are known to be challenged or coerced using the threat of harm to family members. It's especially bad for uighur and tibetan expats.
Here's the thing. The US has certainly done bad shit. By and large it reckons with it and is subject to corrective action. And we see the effects of that: The current administration (so far) and the previous administration have not started wars in any new countries. Libya was less bad than Iraq was less bad than Vietnam. The direction of us policy is getting better. The direction of Chinese foreign policy is getting worse and their domestic policy is trending genocidal, and there is limited internal dialogue and thus less of a forcing function for amelioration (Hard to make that comparison since CR policies killed millions more than genocide, albeit indiscriminately)
> I hope one day people can look at their own governments more critically
Yes, I hope that one day too, Chinese citizens can look at their country in as critical a way as us citizens can.
What kind of corrective action? The US has never faced any backlash for helping Brazil (my country) to maintain a dictatorship because of communism fears, for example.