Live data from Hacker News

U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

wsj.com

791–800 of 802 posts

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#791
post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be zionism rather than 'fanboiing' over Trump that motivates him. It seems one has to curry favours with Trump to keep him tolerant of Netanyahu and unconditionally supporting of the state of Israel, and this would likely have such an effect. Recently the Ellison clan dumped a large amount of money on the infamous genocidaire Bari Weiss and is pushing CBS to accept her as a senior member of their news organi…

Can someone explain to me why the rich and powerful care about Israel so much? I really don't get it.

There are probably a lot of reasons I haven't encountered.

Among the common ones I have are things like Palestine being like a lawless laboratory where industrialists are trying out new gadgets and systems on human populations, which is an important driver in civil as well as military state power towards both their own populations and foreign.

It's also one of the last surviving colonial projects and some old money dynasties stick by it for nostalgic or geopolitical reasons. Related to this is a common form of racism, where the state of Israel is perceived as a civilised western bulwark against the unshaven barbaric hordes of the east.

Then there are religious convictions, especially common among usians, who are often of the belief that there is a God that has a plan for the cosmos that involves first telling the jews about ethics and then replacing them with christians but keeping the jews around as the first line of defense in the ultimate war to end all wars and history itself. Usually this is expressed as a philosemitic form of antisemitism where they see themselves as kind of stewards of the jewish diaspora communities and take on themselves the purpose of moving all jews close to Jerusalem, where this final war is supposed to begin. It's not uncommon that these people perceive arab and persian muslims as basically an Antichrist entity that needs to be eradicated, either in the short term if they're uppity or kept in some form of economic or political bondage.

While there's a lot of conspiracist beliefs surrounding it I'm also convinced there is some truth to the view that israeli security services keeps a lot of kompromat and similar tools of power involving rich and powerful people. Open assassinations and the like have backfired sometimes, e.g. the Lillehammer scandal, and I suspect that this has pushed israeli security to try to adapt to more shadowy tactics.

And then you have people with Holocaust or related forms of shallowly antiracist anxieties, that have convinced themselves that the jews deserve Palestine due to historic attempts at extermination. This is somewhat related to christian zionist beliefs where jews are considered somehow special, 'a chosen people', which is why they are supposedly deserving of an atrocity-laden settler colonial project but e.g. the cirkassians are not and they don't care about the christians of Artsakh and so on.

Plus the economic opportunities due to huge free-money investments into corporations situated in Israel and more mundane imperial considerations like the geopolitical positioning as a destabilising force between Eurasia and Africa as well as on the edge of Eurasia itself. The Mediterranean is small but imagine if there was high-speed rail and a decent degree of social and economic integration all the way from South Africa and Mauritania up to Europe, that would make this a hugely important economic and political area and North America would look puny and useless beside it, due to being surrounded by oceans and so on. Israel also happens to be a base for nuclear weapons placed really close to some of the largest energy reserves on the planet, and largely dependent on states really far away that in turn are highly dependent on the exploitation of these energy reserves.

Also, some people are plain sadists. They feel pleasure and giddiness when they know there are other people on what they perceive as their team doing the worst of things, just the nastiest possible stuff, the most excruciating forms of hierarchy and power imbalance. Sometimes because that makes the power imbalances that keep them in place look relatively sane and tolerable.

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you preferred it when it was controlled by liberal interests.

Next time Dems win elections (if that's ever), it will be. Politicians on both sides are happy about this.

It's only a problem for the GOP if Dems do win elections again. Judging by how things are progressing, it may not happen anymore. They have complete control over everything.

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I do want the world's most influential social media app to be within the jurisdiction of a non-authoritarian state, yes.

So... we're transferring it to one who requires a government representative on its board?

Harm reduction accomplished! Sounds like we agree on the underlying principle.

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I do want the world's most influential social media app to be within the jurisdiction of a non-authoritarian state, yes.

"non-authoritarian" state said completely unironically.

It's the difference between a house that's on fire, and a house that's been fully burned to the ground and replaced with a maximum security prison. If you can't distinguish between those, I don't think your grasp on objective reality is strong enough for you to be qualified to participate in the conversation.

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I do want the world's most influential social media app to be within the jurisdiction of a non-authoritarian state, yes.

So then you agree that putting our current government even partially in charge of the new company would be a bad idea?

I agree that it is harm reduction relative to the status quo.

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I do want the world's most influential social media app to be within the jurisdiction of a non-authoritarian state, yes.

The USA is also an authoritarian State, it just has better marketing. I live in Taiwan. I'm no fan of the CPC. But if you zoom out a bit, it's kinda hard to distinguish the two beyond Americans winning global cultural victory (CPC propaganda is still goofy and obvious). Point at tiananmem square, an atrocious massacre of their own citizenry. The USA has done this - it has locked its citizens in concentration camps, s…

I'll start by recommending you look up whataboutism, and learn about why it's a fallacious form of argumentation. There's definitely a non-fallacious way of making your argument, but that's your job.

I also don't think your assessment of the relative histories is reliable, but for our purposes here, that's all largely beside the point, because the degree of national security alignment of domestic companies in China compared to the United States are at completely different orders of magnitude, which is the pertinent issue when considering harm reduction here.

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now would be a good time to remind people that freedom of speech, whether you like it or not, applies to large entities as well as individuals. TikTok is as free to boost a pro-Israel narrative as you are to boost an anti-Israel narrative. Stating that there’s some sort of “mind control” at work is both false and insults people’s intelligence. For one, there is literally no way to “control” someone’s mind. Influence…

>TikTok is as free to boost a pro-Israel narrative as you are to boost an anti-Israel narrative. I boost an anti-israel narrative by exercising my right to free speech. In this case, The zionists are boosting a pro-israel narrative by excising free speech like mine - by banning Tiktok, then coercing Bytedance into selling their US subsidiary, and installing a IDF spokesperson to censor and moderate it. >Stating that…

> In this case, The zionists are boosting a pro-israel narrative by excising free speech like mine - by banning Tiktok, then coercing Bytedance into selling their US subsidiary, and installing a IDF spokesperson to censor and moderate it.

Despite all the hue and cry to the contrary, your right to free speech ends at someone else's door. Free speech means that the government cannot censor you. It does not require that someone else allow you to use their megaphone to do it, or to share their megaphone among everyone equally. To claim otherwise misconstrues a century of First Amendment jurisprudence.

To be 100% clear: there is no First Amendment law in the USA that says that social media platforms' refusing to broadcast its users opinions equally violates their free speech rights. You can claim it does until your fingers fall off, but the law does not support this position.

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#798
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without screens, how do you get the scale needed to organise and influence the direction of your country?

I don't and I'm ok with that. Let's go out and organize and influence the direction of our _communities_ first. No screen needed. That's the level you can impact as an ordinary person. It makes me immediately suspicious when someone wants to reach _everbody_, that's never good and we shouldn't let them. Ideas will grow if they're good, if you have to spend money to make people listen, they're not.

My point is that the less decent but more aggressive ideas will dominate when their organisers and the masses use screens around you. The half-trillionaires will ultimately continue to dictate terms of your broader community, environment and atmosphere.

Ideas don't grow because they're good but because they push instinctive buttons, or save money, or give people what they want with minimal effort.

It goes without saying that anyone can opt out and ignore anyone beyond their personal circle.

I think there's another option, which is using screens in a more positive way.

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#799
post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but as soon as a leftist calls someone with actual authoritarian viewpoints a nazi The left en masse has been doing this for 10 years, and for far less that "authoritarian viewpoints".

Not surprised this is your only argument to my post. It was an easy, yet flawed example on my part. People say all sorts of stuff, but if your consistently being told by a large cohort of individuals your shit stinks for a decade, it probably stinks.

> People say all sorts of stuff, but if your consistently being told by a large cohort of individuals your shit stinks for a decade, it probably stinks.

I agree that the authoritarian left has very much tried to recreate the "no smoke without fire" pre-liberal "justice" system, but all it takes is organisational capture of media coupled with a lot of people without any critical thinking skills.

Re: U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China

#800
post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the microwaved corpse of the original 2020 deal. Bytedance keeps all the IP, sells Oracle the nearly worthless right to operate the US infra. They can't even call their franken-app Tiktok. The US user data already sits in the US but they'll expect everyone to forget about that so they can brag about this token win. They'll probably get what they really want, which is an admin console for the algorithm…

Reich? You need to check the background of those involved in the deal.

The Reich analogy is about authoritarian deeds, not about ethnic background. Any race is capable of those, even (or especially) ex-victims of the German reich.
Post reply on HN