Earlier quoted context omitted.
That the US is illegally spying on its own citizens is bad, but not as bad as allowing an explicitly hostile, autocratic foreign power to turn a massive propaganda and surveillance platform on US citizens. 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 Commu…
> the US is illegally spying on its own citizens is bad, but not as bad as 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.
The relevance from my perspective is that I'm much more alarmed by spying and manipulation by a hostile foreign entity which explicitly places securing its own power above all else, than I am by spying and manipulation by agents of the US government, which is explicitly founded on principles of transparency and accountability to its citizens and has many institutional guardrails intended to serve those principles, even if those guardrails aren't fully effective. At least in the US there is the ideological possibility of peacefully voting in representatives who would strengthen and improve those guardrails. That's not something an agent of the CCP is even supposed or motivated to think about.