Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.
Perhaps the way to get anti-regulation politicians on board with this is for someone to do what was done to Robert Bork and legally disclose lots of personal info on members of Congress/Parliament, obtained from data brokers and de-anonymized.
Like imagine if China owned CNN and the New York Times and decided what stories they could publish.
Long form content, unrestricted by executives telling people how to run their show, all that makes a big difference. There is no need for corporate bureaucrats to try to run things.
Describing them as an enemy might be too far, but you certainly wouldn’t describe China as a friend.
When the Elkann family (which owns majority stake in Stellantis, Juventus, Ferrari and many others) got pissed off by the largest newspaper in Italy reporting on them (despite their businesses impacting the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Italians) they simply bought the newspaper and the major critical voice of them disappeared.
If there is a major nation on this planet that has never done anything bad to mine in its history I can think of is China.
I can remember American, British, French troops raping and humiliating that country, I can't remember a single time the opposite happened.
While China does not always play fair and there's plenty of despicable things they do I don't like, I just don't see them as my enemy and see no valid reason to do so.
I'm don't want to be completely pollyannish about the past - there were probably things we weren't hearing about from those fewer outlets. But I'm also not sure how we move forward as a society in a situation where there are so many different shattered views of what is true.
The biggest foreign meddler and spy in Canada is the southern neighbor.
We know for a fact through leaks that US has put all Canadians under mass surveillance both in communication and movement (like the wifi hacking at airports leaked by Snowden) since more than a decade, or the 2023 Pentagon leaks that were quickly scolded as "but they were trying to find Russian activity in Canada", and don't forget the AT&T whistleblower which also exposed mass surveillance on Canadians by US intelligence.
And yet..nobody cares..even though we know for a fact it happens, we don't care let alone call the US an enemy.
So, what is the difference? The media and politicians calling 24/7 China your enemy (something nobody would've done before 2018/2017), but ignoring or pretending that the real spy of all spies which hacks and spies on all of its allies, even the personal phone of the German chancellor is cool.
I find those double standards not only mind blowing, but dangerous.
We're letting the White House to dictate globally who can play by the rules and who is an exception.
We are “divided” now because we are basically in a battle for what is consensus reality, and the only way to have a satisfying answer to that question is to have unfettered access to the underlying facts and knowledge of who is who.
Sadly, and I think I called that out few years ago, there was a notable turn in US foreign policy. In effect, it means establishment expects actual confrontation with China. This, naturally, means uptick in anti-China propaganda. It is a difficult position to take now in a pragmatic way given events in Ukraine and Israel, but that is clearly the direction. Hence, comments like those of OP.
We banned a single corporate entity from operating offices inside the country in response to credible intelligence that those offices pose a national security threat. That corporate entity is directly linked with an adversarial government with active election subversion campaigns.
Is there some reason you are twisting the actual circumstances around this?
I'm concerned we're going to get to the point where people are willing to kill each other over what they consider to be their view of "consensus reality". That's happened often at other points in history. In many cases it was due to religious differences over what constituted "reality". I'm not so sure that many of these current squabbles over what constitutes "consensus reality" aren't religious in nature. Social media already seems to be pushing the limits of human nature in some destructive directions such that politics now is like holy war.
I think we need to focus more on the "consensus" part (including peacemaking and bridge building) instead of the "battle" part. I'm not seeing a lot of that happening. That requires a lot of humility as in we're all like blind people groping our way to figure out reality and none of us has the complete picture. Until we're ready to take on that kind of humility on a societal level, I think this "battle" you refer to can be a very dangerous endeavor.
It wasn’t long ago that we regularly witnessed rhetoric hinting at putting people into camps and denying them access to food because they didn’t buy into the official narrative about vaccines.
Is that a better option? I don’t think so.
I do agree that there is a basis for building bridges and finding common ground but this is better done at the local level between people vs. trying to force it from on high. And definitely, in my opinion, not via some controlled medium.
And where was that rhetoric happening? On social media. Outside of China (and maybe some similar regimes), I don't recall any government official suggesting anything about camps or limiting access to food (even China delivered food to the people they welded into their apartments, so not even there), certainly not in the US.
On the other hand pretending that the CCP and the US are meddling at the same level or with the same consequences, or that the CSIS isn’t in on half of what the US is doing is also silly.
I can condemn China and recognize that they pose a serious threat, while also condemning the US and recognizing that the threat is different.
(Proving that he's not really an anarchist.)
Of course, he couched it terms of plausible deniability but anybody with the ability to read between the lines knew exactly what he was saying.
This was during the environment in which small and family-owned businesses were being destroyed (yes, in America) and people were losing their jobs as well. It happened to a number of personal friends.
There were far worse excesses in other Western nations too, not just in China. The only reason things didn't go further in the US here is because Americans have fewer vulnerabilities than citizens in other countries do in the face of this sort of oppression.
And it was all cheered on by those who believed themselves to be on the right side of the establishment at that time. It was a regular thing to see and hear people fantasizing about the idea of forced injections, online and in real life.
And we learned about all this on, yes, social media (which was heavily censored at the time too).
The legacy media outlets were not telling the truth.
All this was only three years ago.
Things are a little different now, I'm sure you will find in many cases that forgiveness is possible in light of true apologies, but there will not be a forgetting.
And these things need to be honestly discussed if we are ever to achieve anything resembling national cohesion again.
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...