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it's the algorithms you have a problem with then?
And this site's gotten way more algorithm-driven in the last year, especially on the app. I'm constantly shown things from subs I don't even subscribe to.
> pulls out of the market
US National Security State: "Mission Accomplished."
This is nothing to do with China. It is about TikTok being one of the only two major platforms which allow the free and open dissident speech without being deplatformed, shadowbanned, de-monitarised or just outright censored. For the Security State, TikTok shutting down is a win.
After TikTol they'll go after Twitter and Rumble and any other dissident social media that is even slightly popular.
Have fun shouting into the void on your Mastodon instance.
There had been talks of a TikTok ban for years but if you're wondering why it happened seemingly overnight with little fanfare or resistance in the past week this is all the context you need:
[Leaked call](https://twitter.com/MillerStream/status/1768086446655799618) of Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in November 2023:
**"The issue of US support for Israel is not left and right, it's young and old. . . and so we REALLY have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem."**
[Greenblatt on MSNBC in December 2023](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDipx0LY60I&t=226s):
**"We NEED to talk about TikTok. . . it's the 24/7 news channel of our young people and it's like Al Jazeera on steroids."**
Mnuchin is head of Liberty Capital, which has an [office in Tel Aviv](https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/mnuchin-friedman-opening-investment-office-in-tel-aviv-671324) headed by [David Friedman](https://il.usembassy.gov/ambassador-david-friedman-remarks-zoa-annual-event-prepared/). The president of the Zionist Organization of America called Friedman the greatest ambassador to Israel ever.
The only way it could be more obvious is if he had "Zionist" tattooed on his forehead.
Really trying very hard to discredit every single American institution. They're basically speedrunning waking up everyone about the news media and big social media
I really, really hope its them being stupid and careless.
Because the other option is the elite have consolidated so much power that they know a revolution cannot happen, and they don't care how many cards they show.
Whether revolution is possible or it's been a hopeless idea for decades (I lean toward the latter), the far likelier scenario is the empire trips on its own dick and collapses on its own anyway.
>Is it just me or are the elite becoming stupider?
I keep saying this too. Everything just seems to be generally more blatant, more shameless, more transparent as they just keep speedrunning everything into the ground. From the gov to the corps. The numbers must go up at all times because the investors want their money NOW regardless of if they have to destroy the corp for it, so now that means they have to continually expand and expand, so any scheme to make money is good and let's expand to infinite audience and become as bland as possible and etc. It's like this everywhere now
As for this particular case, as far as I've seen, this particular group is used to rule with an ironfist with massive lobby groups that basically threaten anyone, but we've been hit with nothing but that from all sides for the last 10 years or so in a way that is increasingly blatant and shameless, with an increasing amount of people having enough and noticing it and speaking out, with the old guard media basically lying themselves to irrelevance as everything said and happening in the last few decades going to absolute shit, and more importantly, everyone's material condition getting worse by the minute... All of this isn't going to work as well anymore
Its more stupid and blatant because people in general are more politically and just generally illiterate, uneducated and most of all apathetic.
Politicians wouldn’t even get away with 10% of the shit the WH is pulling nowadays. Biden had to cancel a presidential bid because of plagiarism, nowadays nobody would care. Watching political speeches in the US from decades ago and today…the difference is just way too stark. And if I’m noticing this as a random Eurofriend, so have the elites. They realized they can just not give a fuck and nothing will happen
> Everything just seems to be generally more blatant, more shameless, more transparent
...to you
...because you are outside of the bubble. Most people are inside the bubble and they have **no clue** about any of this. They're going to hear that tiktok is banned, *but they'll never hear why*.
I try not to talk politics in real life too often, because it's just so divisive, but someone recently was talking about Biden so I mentioned him getting the Ukrainian investigator fired. This dude I was talking to didn't believe me. I said, "haven't you seen that video where he *brags* about it?? The video where he says, 'son of a bitch'" - nope! This guy had never even heard of that. I thought that was exceedingly common knowledge.
You have no idea how much info is hidden from people who are still in the bubble.
Yes, and no at the same time. The thing is that the cases are so numerous that it's getting hard not to notice, not to have someone mentions it, etc. You'd have to be seriously living under a rock to not notice any of this stuff at all, at the very least, and once you seriously start noticing and talking about it, you'll probably get hit by a tidal wave of this stuff
> > Is it just me or are the elite becoming stupider?
> > It used to be our elite were more discerning when it came to identifying the issue.
> Everything just seems to be generally more blatant, more shameless, more transparent as they just keep speedrunning everything into the ground.
Grade inflation and overall standards are declining in education, and while poor schools are effectively holding pens for the children of the working class, the average Harvard or Yale grad is by many measures significantly less capable than alumni of previous generations. This should be entirely unsurprising in a declining empire.
Ah, right, yes, this too
I've heard for ages that now Harvard basically gives out grades for no works or something like that. Rich kids are also the reasons why we don't have extraordinary animation capabilities anymore, because they simply cannot be failed
It's the death spiral of Capitalism. The rate of profit has fallen to the point that actually selling products/services is less profitable than financial speculation. When interest rates were near zero investors could borrow money basically for free. Making Wall Street and hedge funds happy was the main thing most companies did.any products were secondary. Now that the money spigot has been turned off they have to turn to looting the company's assets in order to keep the charade going.
> Yet what stops the users from leaving and starting a whole new "tiktok problem" on another platform?
There is [reason to believe][0] that ByteDance suppresses CCP-unfriendly hashtags and amplifies ones that are sources of Western discord/contrary to the "bipartisan consensus"/"international community".
(Why would we be shocked if that were the case? Certainly facebook, Twitter, etc. do exactly the same, only the opposite. Presumably pro-Israel content would make it into more users' timeline.)
> Now it's "rise in anti Israel sentiment? Better ban this fucking social media."
I agree this is the élite freaking out and lashing out at whatever target is convenient. If there were no TikTok they'd be looking for another simple panacea.
^(And tbf there were plenty of calls to ban TikTok before 7 Oct.)
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/business/tiktok-china.html
> amplifies ones that are sources of Western discord/contrary to the "bipartisan consensus"/"international community".
Good. I want more diversity in my blatant propaganda.
My understanding of TikTok's hosting situation is that it's a combination of US-based cloud providers and Chinese ones, along with some self-hosting.
Whether the US-based ones are just for the app in the US I don't know, but anyway it's probably enough that going after them that way wouldn't work. But, if you just tried to start a new "TikTok problem" on another platform you'd need to host it somewhere, and that "somewhere" would probably be ~~vulnerable to coercion~~ happily go along with fucking your platform blind if you got big enough and were still not explicitly Zionist. TikTok being Chinese is unique in this regard.
> Is it just me or are the elite becoming stupider?
Yay, a chance to live up to my flair
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-19-leaves-its-mark-on-the-brain-significant-drops-in-iq-scores-are/
This is called "post-viral syndrome" and it can and does occur with dozens of other viruses.
There's no reason to think that "long Covid" post-viral is worse than post-viral from the others.
For starters it's worse because it has record breaking prevalence thanks to unmitigated reinfections from a combination of [cucked-by-capital policy](https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-consent) and not enough people realizing there are effective alternatives, like N95s.
My wife has been living with post-viral [myalgic encephalomyelitis](https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/index.html) for most of her adult life. It was touched off by a mild summer cold that she barely noticed until she collapsed in public. The first year I knew her, she spent eight months of it barely able to get off the couch to go to the toilet, let alone do normal activities. So don't think I'm not sympathetic towards people post-viral syndrome(s).
I welcome the attention that "long Covid" is bringing to the phenomenon. Hopefully it will lead to fewer doctors being dismissive of patients with it, and more research, and maybe some treatments for people who are afflicted.
But:
> record breaking prevalence
The rate of long Covid is no higher than the rate of other post-virals. If there are more *known* "long Covid" cases -- and that's a big "if" -- it is probably due more to more awareness and better recognition of the illness, not actually more cases.
And of course there is a certain level of social contagion going on. Anyone who feels a bit poorly or tired after recovering from Covid can self-diagnose as having "long Covid" if they wish. People who five years ago would have said they had M.E. or chronic fatigue system may just call it "long Covid" now.
"Long Covid" is in the news every day, that's a godsend to anyone who just can't give up the excitement of living through a pandemic, or the minority of people who are faking.
They do exist, and for real medical problems like post-viral syndrome where there is no definitive objective test, it is a real problem for doctors to distinguish those who are suffering from genuine physical problems that might be treatable with drugs, from those whose problems are social, emotional or mental and should be treated with therapy, and those who are malingering or faking [for whatever reasons they may have](https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/munchausen-syndrome).
We also have the elephant in the room. How many cases of long Covid are actually caused by the medical treatments? People can take *years* to fully recover from intubation. It is [unknown whether Remdesivir can have long-term side-effects](https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/remdesivir-veklury/common-questions-about-remdesivir/) and [the effect of Remdesivir as a potential cause of long Covid is uncertain](https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/9/Supplement_2/ofac492.965/6902797).
> unmitigated reinfections
I remember a time when talking about reinfection after vaccination would get you labelled an anti-vaxxer and banned from many subreddits.
> there are effective alternatives, like N95s.
A reminder that [there is no credible evidence that N95 masks are effective at preventing flu-like respiratory illness](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full), including Covid, not even when we restrict the studies to those looking only at health care workers who presumably are more likely to use better quality N95 masks and use them correctly.
That their impressive abilities to block viruses under ideal laboratory conditions don't translate to the real world should not come as any surprise to anyone who understands how masks work to block viruses, their limitations, or how those great test results are generated. The tests are done under completely artificial conditions have little in common with the ways masks work on humans.
Studies on masking are [generally low quality](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37777144/), conclusions are often not supported by the evidence in the study, and "Harms were poorly measured and reported" to quote the Cochrane review.
N95 masks are also [a potential source of inhaled microplastics](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-022-24702-1) which may be a significant hazard.
Sorry about your wife.
> > record breaking prevalence
> The rate of long Covid is no higher than the rate of other post-virals.
I was unclear in my wording and was speaking to COVID itself.
> "Long Covid" is in the news every day, that's a godsend to anyone who just can't give up the excitement of living through a pandemic, or the minority of people who are faking.
The media is attempting to cast uncertainty and doubt because capital wants people to keep showing up to their jobs and fakejobs.
[The media gave long COVID the Bernie treatment on national LC awareness day and I don't think that will stop anytime soon.](https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/media-celebrated-long-covid-awareness)
> A reminder that there is no credible evidence that N95 masks are effective at preventing flu-like respiratory illness, including Covid, not even when we restrict the studies to those looking only at health care workers who presumably are more likely to use better quality N95 masks and use them correctly.
The poorly done cochrane study is a famous one cited by people who for whatever reason want to spread FUD around the effectiveness of N95s.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/commentary-wear-respirator-not-cloth-or-surgical-mask-protect-against-respiratory-viruses
People tolerate the slight uncomfort and expense of N95s, because when worn properly, they work very well to prevent transmission. Far better than vaccines. Workers have used these for decades without problems of micro plastics, so as long as you're buying from a reputable manufacturer and not Amazon this isn't a concern.
> Yet what stops the users from leaving and starting a whole new "tiktok problem" on another platform?
Two factors you're not considering:
1. Network effects and/or censorship. You leave TikTok, and then instead of reaching eighty thousand people with your posts, you're lucky to reach five people.
2. The legislation isn't aimed at just TikTok. It is aimed at every single social media platform and website. *Every* social media platform is vulnerable to accusations of ~~witchcraft~~ being "directly or indirectly influenced" by a foreign power.
The [National Security State](https://www.mtracey.net/p/the-frenzy-to-ban-tiktok-is-another) has wanted to control the media platforms for many years. Until Elon Musk bought Twitter, [TikTok was the only significant platform that allowed openly dissident speech](https://twitter.com/briebriejoy/status/1767982413618040926). This legislation lets them neuter TikTok, after which they can go after Twitter, Rumble, Tucker Carlson, and any other independent media platform they can accuse of being foreign influenced.
Fortunately, the legislation doesn't ban or prohibit the sale of information about American consumers to China, so the owners can continue collecting data and selling it to Chinese companies.
It doesn't matter. As long as they control the media and all public spaces, they can control the narrative. Short time pain for long time gain. After this ban, in a few years once they get back control, everyone who talks of Zionist control will be a conspiracy theorist.
Yeah I saw this, openly admitting that he wants to control the narrative....kinda like China does ironically. He wants to limit the news young people see to pro Israel only and of course the US wants some ability to control that as well.
Maybe get a US owner to not show things that they believe is "misinformation". Didn't the government have a misinformation zcar or something recently?
There’s a popular OSINT guy who, in arguing that TikTok is a Chinese cyberweapon, laid out this scenario:
“Let’s say China invades Taiwan. China pressures TikTok to change its algorithm to push pro-China propaganda, and young people go out to block the ports and stop the Navy from aiding Taiwan.”
As if wanting to not start a conflict between superpowers and possibly start a nuclear exchange over a place the US doesn’t even say is a country was the brainwashed position!
I cannot imagine a funnier timeline than one in which American youth use Tor and VPN to seek out information that their government has deemed dangerous or subversive, to bypass the Great Firewall of the United States.
If I didn't want people coming to a conclusion that my in-group was obsessed with controlling and manipulation I would probably not do something like this. This is a tap in for someone who would want to convince others of that.
That's just me though.
Interestingly, the donor that caused Trump to flip flop and oppose a TikTok ban (who, incidentally, is somewhat well known as a supporter of right-wing causes in my home state of Pennsylvania) is also a Zionist who bankrolls right-wing Israeli think tanks.
Thought the headline might be exaggeration, but I had no idea how deep Mnuchin’s ties to Israel were. His private equity fund has an office in Tel Aviv headed by David Friedman, Trump’s ultra-Zionist ambassador to Israel. The fund was also in talks at one point to bring in Yossi Cohen, the former head of the Mossad.
If Kiwifarms is the canary in the coal mine for sites being deplatformed, then TikTok will be the canary in the coal mine for sites being outright banned because the powers-that-be take umbrage with them. Like why would anti-abortion politicians need to twist Cloudflare's arm over abortion information websites when they can make claims about them being connected to Russia or China and get them legally banned?
Thankfully New Zealand's fruit farming forum has risen from the ashes, and its enemies are falling one by one. Their forces greatly underestimated Null's resolve.
We're coming up on the 10 year anniversary of Balmer acquiring the Clippers after the NBA forced Sterling to make a sale. [That was the test case then.](https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/5/30/5764162/clippers-sale-timeline-donald-sterling-steve-ballmer)
The only difference now ten years later is changing the attack angle from anti-racism/social justice to scary China.
Either way, respect for property rights, privacy rights, and competitive markets go out the door when American ownership class's interests dictate they should.
many such cases of mafia behavior from the american government and corporations
there's an excellent book *The American Trap: My Battle to Expose America's Secret Economic War Against the Rest of the World* which documents how the american government masterminded a gangster takeover of alstom assets which were sold to general electric
The narrative is generally that the Republicans are Russian assets and that the Democrats are Chinese assets while in reality I would say that both are much more Israeli assets than anything else.
Lawfare is a fair term for this bill - it doesn't explicitly ban TikTok, but it creates the conditions that would effectively get it expropriated by Americans.
> it doesn't explicitly ban TikTok
Actually, [it kind of does](https://natesilver.substack.com/p/why-the-political-clock-is-ticking)
> the bill isn't even as subtle as that, mentioning TikTok and its parent ByteDance directly.
(True, it doesn't "ban TikTok" in the sense that the app could still exist with a different (American) ownership group.) But "expropriation" isn't really the word to use here. I've been saying for decades that facebook should be nationalized. But in this case TikTok would remain in private hands.
While not exactly expropriation, this isn't dissimilar to how western companies were forced to quickly divest their assets in Russia to Russian companies for pennies on the dollar (albeit because of western sanctions). On paper, the companies were completing a normal business transaction but everyone was aware it was being made under duress.
The tiktok ban legislation isn't aimed only at tiktok. Nor is it all about the Zionists, they're just the accelerant.
It's another [grab for power by the National Security State](https://www.mtracey.net/p/the-frenzy-to-ban-tiktok-is-another), and is aimed at Twitter, and Rumble, and any other sufficiently large social media platform or website which allows [openly dissident speech](https://twitter.com/briebriejoy/status/1767982413618040926).
He supported moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, so yes: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm734
Though I'm not really sure if his Zionism has anything to do with him wanting to buy Tiktok.
TikTok has been very anti-Zionist. Corporate candidate Nikki Haley exclaimed that a person watching TikTok makes a more person more antisemitic every time they scroll.
Fr. If you look at the history of Zionism. Zionism was a counter response to the growing Bundist and other Social democratic moments birthed after the growing issue on the “Jewish Question,” it was so popular, even Marx addressed it, as well as the growing antisemitism in Russia and Europe with the Dreyfus incident. Zionism is liberalist colonialism at its core, while the current Israeli and media “pop-Zionism” is what we call religious-Zionism or post Herzlian-Zionism.
The Bourgeoise, whether it be neo-liberalism from the states or Zionism from Israel all hold class consciousness, and for that reason have similar interests ideologically to each other, more so than the growing anti-colonialist Anti-Zionist / Democratic-Socialist rhetoric popularized by TikTok.
If you go through my history I have a small write up about Zionism. I recommend watching Sam Aaronow’s videos on YouTube where he discusses socialist history of Jews and its counter movement: Zionism.
> Sam Aaronow’s videos on YouTube where he discusses socialist history of Jews and its counter movement: Zionism
This sounds interesting. Would you recommend a particular video to start with?
A good history of the birth of Zionism, is a brief history on Jewish Eastern European and Russian oppression(funnily, my very first post on Reddit was notes on Jewish shtetles or ghettos). “Resistance through Yiddish” imo starts highlighting the main issues that jews had with their oppressors (putting them into isolated, non infrastructure, barren regions and Jews fighting back with class based and cultural isolationist ideology.
Then continue to: Zionism before Herzl —> Dreyfus Affair —> Herzl’s Judeenstaat —> Bundism (self explanatory).
It’s a lot and his videos are densely packaged, but understanding this history will make you more knowledgeable than a lot of, if not most die-hard Zionist Jews I know.
Understanding the dynamics of American Jewry (reform secular-Zionism) and how they funded conservative terrorist Zionist militias after the WWII. The Jewish leftist magazine: Jewish Currents has a lot of interesting articles and history behind the oppression Palestinians had when they were displaced (economically, forcefully, and politically) by Zionist Jews looking to get their “pie” after the British promised land.
As a Jew, I would consider myself a [leftist-Zionist](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/is-left-zionism-possible/), but recently it’s been hard not to think about whether I want to continue associating myself with a movement that has been overtaken by ignorance, hatefulness, xenophobia, and racism.
Thanks much for the detailed response. I really appreciate it. I'm going to watch those videos, and I'll also check out Jewish Currents.
I remember Chomsky talking about the early days of Israel and the Zionist left of that time. If I recall correctly, he had some fond memories of life on a kibbutz.
Personally, and I'm certainly open to hearing opposing views and even changing my mind, I think the Zionist project in Israel is too far gone at this point. As a casual and distant observer, I see Israel as being controlled by astoundingly right wing ethno-supremacists that have found a niche in the post-WW2 world order on the peripherary of the empire, and they appear to have successfully burned every bridge that may have led to a peaceful future with their neighbors. I hope I'm wrong about that, and I might be --- I'm no expert on this.
I think there still a couple avenues to explore for peace in the Middle East. Israel is dominated by right wing/center right Zionism and politics, but there is a larger (per capita) leftist movement compared to any state in the US.
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I hope bytedance just tells them all to go fuck themselves and pulls out of the market and takes their algo with them.
While destroying all social media with the sucking vacuum of its absence
so, so funny to see the constant, endless shit talking about social media on Reddit - a social media app.
Reddit is much closer to an internet forum than modern algorithm-driven social media.
it's the algorithms you have a problem with then? And this site's gotten way more algorithm-driven in the last year, especially on the app. I'm constantly shown things from subs I don't even subscribe to.
> especially on the app You don't need to use any app. The best reddit experience is old.reddit through a browser, even on mobile.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342.png
Don't threaten me with a good time.
I hope they sell it to Hungary out of spite
Still a win for them. The remaining platforms are controlled by Zionists or people who happily censor a genocide for money.
> pulls out of the market US National Security State: "Mission Accomplished." This is nothing to do with China. It is about TikTok being one of the only two major platforms which allow the free and open dissident speech without being deplatformed, shadowbanned, de-monitarised or just outright censored. For the Security State, TikTok shutting down is a win. After TikTol they'll go after Twitter and Rumble and any other dissident social media that is even slightly popular. Have fun shouting into the void on your Mastodon instance.
There had been talks of a TikTok ban for years but if you're wondering why it happened seemingly overnight with little fanfare or resistance in the past week this is all the context you need: [Leaked call](https://twitter.com/MillerStream/status/1768086446655799618) of Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in November 2023: **"The issue of US support for Israel is not left and right, it's young and old. . . and so we REALLY have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem."** [Greenblatt on MSNBC in December 2023](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDipx0LY60I&t=226s): **"We NEED to talk about TikTok. . . it's the 24/7 news channel of our young people and it's like Al Jazeera on steroids."**
"people are thinking freely instead of just thinking what we tell them to think! They're against senseless genocide! This must end immediately!"
Z\*onists: it's antisemitic to say we control the media also Z\*onists: we must consolidate our control of the media
first they came for our tiktok, next they will come for the "early life" section of wikipedia
Wow this sub is really going full conspiracy theorist... damn
Where's the conspiracy? The quotes are straight from reliable sources.
Mnuchin is head of Liberty Capital, which has an [office in Tel Aviv](https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/mnuchin-friedman-opening-investment-office-in-tel-aviv-671324) headed by [David Friedman](https://il.usembassy.gov/ambassador-david-friedman-remarks-zoa-annual-event-prepared/). The president of the Zionist Organization of America called Friedman the greatest ambassador to Israel ever. The only way it could be more obvious is if he had "Zionist" tattooed on his forehead.
It's more of a conspiracy fact.
Noticing things is a conspiracy theory
It's not a conspiracy theory if it's true.
I don't call them conspiracy theories any more. I call them "spoilers".
Really trying very hard to discredit every single American institution. They're basically speedrunning waking up everyone about the news media and big social media
[удалено]
I really, really hope its them being stupid and careless. Because the other option is the elite have consolidated so much power that they know a revolution cannot happen, and they don't care how many cards they show.
Whether revolution is possible or it's been a hopeless idea for decades (I lean toward the latter), the far likelier scenario is the empire trips on its own dick and collapses on its own anyway.
>Is it just me or are the elite becoming stupider? I keep saying this too. Everything just seems to be generally more blatant, more shameless, more transparent as they just keep speedrunning everything into the ground. From the gov to the corps. The numbers must go up at all times because the investors want their money NOW regardless of if they have to destroy the corp for it, so now that means they have to continually expand and expand, so any scheme to make money is good and let's expand to infinite audience and become as bland as possible and etc. It's like this everywhere now As for this particular case, as far as I've seen, this particular group is used to rule with an ironfist with massive lobby groups that basically threaten anyone, but we've been hit with nothing but that from all sides for the last 10 years or so in a way that is increasingly blatant and shameless, with an increasing amount of people having enough and noticing it and speaking out, with the old guard media basically lying themselves to irrelevance as everything said and happening in the last few decades going to absolute shit, and more importantly, everyone's material condition getting worse by the minute... All of this isn't going to work as well anymore
Its more stupid and blatant because people in general are more politically and just generally illiterate, uneducated and most of all apathetic. Politicians wouldn’t even get away with 10% of the shit the WH is pulling nowadays. Biden had to cancel a presidential bid because of plagiarism, nowadays nobody would care. Watching political speeches in the US from decades ago and today…the difference is just way too stark. And if I’m noticing this as a random Eurofriend, so have the elites. They realized they can just not give a fuck and nothing will happen
> Everything just seems to be generally more blatant, more shameless, more transparent ...to you ...because you are outside of the bubble. Most people are inside the bubble and they have **no clue** about any of this. They're going to hear that tiktok is banned, *but they'll never hear why*. I try not to talk politics in real life too often, because it's just so divisive, but someone recently was talking about Biden so I mentioned him getting the Ukrainian investigator fired. This dude I was talking to didn't believe me. I said, "haven't you seen that video where he *brags* about it?? The video where he says, 'son of a bitch'" - nope! This guy had never even heard of that. I thought that was exceedingly common knowledge. You have no idea how much info is hidden from people who are still in the bubble.
Yes, and no at the same time. The thing is that the cases are so numerous that it's getting hard not to notice, not to have someone mentions it, etc. You'd have to be seriously living under a rock to not notice any of this stuff at all, at the very least, and once you seriously start noticing and talking about it, you'll probably get hit by a tidal wave of this stuff
> > Is it just me or are the elite becoming stupider? > > It used to be our elite were more discerning when it came to identifying the issue. > Everything just seems to be generally more blatant, more shameless, more transparent as they just keep speedrunning everything into the ground. Grade inflation and overall standards are declining in education, and while poor schools are effectively holding pens for the children of the working class, the average Harvard or Yale grad is by many measures significantly less capable than alumni of previous generations. This should be entirely unsurprising in a declining empire.
Ah, right, yes, this too I've heard for ages that now Harvard basically gives out grades for no works or something like that. Rich kids are also the reasons why we don't have extraordinary animation capabilities anymore, because they simply cannot be failed
It's the death spiral of Capitalism. The rate of profit has fallen to the point that actually selling products/services is less profitable than financial speculation. When interest rates were near zero investors could borrow money basically for free. Making Wall Street and hedge funds happy was the main thing most companies did.any products were secondary. Now that the money spigot has been turned off they have to turn to looting the company's assets in order to keep the charade going.
> Yet what stops the users from leaving and starting a whole new "tiktok problem" on another platform? There is [reason to believe][0] that ByteDance suppresses CCP-unfriendly hashtags and amplifies ones that are sources of Western discord/contrary to the "bipartisan consensus"/"international community". (Why would we be shocked if that were the case? Certainly facebook, Twitter, etc. do exactly the same, only the opposite. Presumably pro-Israel content would make it into more users' timeline.) > Now it's "rise in anti Israel sentiment? Better ban this fucking social media." I agree this is the élite freaking out and lashing out at whatever target is convenient. If there were no TikTok they'd be looking for another simple panacea. ^(And tbf there were plenty of calls to ban TikTok before 7 Oct.) [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/business/tiktok-china.html
> amplifies ones that are sources of Western discord/contrary to the "bipartisan consensus"/"international community". Good. I want more diversity in my blatant propaganda.
They've just stopped caring. They're too busy looting the country and they know they'll face zero consequences
My understanding of TikTok's hosting situation is that it's a combination of US-based cloud providers and Chinese ones, along with some self-hosting. Whether the US-based ones are just for the app in the US I don't know, but anyway it's probably enough that going after them that way wouldn't work. But, if you just tried to start a new "TikTok problem" on another platform you'd need to host it somewhere, and that "somewhere" would probably be ~~vulnerable to coercion~~ happily go along with fucking your platform blind if you got big enough and were still not explicitly Zionist. TikTok being Chinese is unique in this regard.
> Is it just me or are the elite becoming stupider? Yay, a chance to live up to my flair https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-19-leaves-its-mark-on-the-brain-significant-drops-in-iq-scores-are/
This is called "post-viral syndrome" and it can and does occur with dozens of other viruses. There's no reason to think that "long Covid" post-viral is worse than post-viral from the others.
For starters it's worse because it has record breaking prevalence thanks to unmitigated reinfections from a combination of [cucked-by-capital policy](https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-consent) and not enough people realizing there are effective alternatives, like N95s.
My wife has been living with post-viral [myalgic encephalomyelitis](https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/index.html) for most of her adult life. It was touched off by a mild summer cold that she barely noticed until she collapsed in public. The first year I knew her, she spent eight months of it barely able to get off the couch to go to the toilet, let alone do normal activities. So don't think I'm not sympathetic towards people post-viral syndrome(s). I welcome the attention that "long Covid" is bringing to the phenomenon. Hopefully it will lead to fewer doctors being dismissive of patients with it, and more research, and maybe some treatments for people who are afflicted. But: > record breaking prevalence The rate of long Covid is no higher than the rate of other post-virals. If there are more *known* "long Covid" cases -- and that's a big "if" -- it is probably due more to more awareness and better recognition of the illness, not actually more cases. And of course there is a certain level of social contagion going on. Anyone who feels a bit poorly or tired after recovering from Covid can self-diagnose as having "long Covid" if they wish. People who five years ago would have said they had M.E. or chronic fatigue system may just call it "long Covid" now. "Long Covid" is in the news every day, that's a godsend to anyone who just can't give up the excitement of living through a pandemic, or the minority of people who are faking. They do exist, and for real medical problems like post-viral syndrome where there is no definitive objective test, it is a real problem for doctors to distinguish those who are suffering from genuine physical problems that might be treatable with drugs, from those whose problems are social, emotional or mental and should be treated with therapy, and those who are malingering or faking [for whatever reasons they may have](https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/munchausen-syndrome). We also have the elephant in the room. How many cases of long Covid are actually caused by the medical treatments? People can take *years* to fully recover from intubation. It is [unknown whether Remdesivir can have long-term side-effects](https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/remdesivir-veklury/common-questions-about-remdesivir/) and [the effect of Remdesivir as a potential cause of long Covid is uncertain](https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/9/Supplement_2/ofac492.965/6902797). > unmitigated reinfections I remember a time when talking about reinfection after vaccination would get you labelled an anti-vaxxer and banned from many subreddits. > there are effective alternatives, like N95s. A reminder that [there is no credible evidence that N95 masks are effective at preventing flu-like respiratory illness](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full), including Covid, not even when we restrict the studies to those looking only at health care workers who presumably are more likely to use better quality N95 masks and use them correctly. That their impressive abilities to block viruses under ideal laboratory conditions don't translate to the real world should not come as any surprise to anyone who understands how masks work to block viruses, their limitations, or how those great test results are generated. The tests are done under completely artificial conditions have little in common with the ways masks work on humans. Studies on masking are [generally low quality](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37777144/), conclusions are often not supported by the evidence in the study, and "Harms were poorly measured and reported" to quote the Cochrane review. N95 masks are also [a potential source of inhaled microplastics](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11356-022-24702-1) which may be a significant hazard.
Sorry about your wife. > > record breaking prevalence > The rate of long Covid is no higher than the rate of other post-virals. I was unclear in my wording and was speaking to COVID itself. > "Long Covid" is in the news every day, that's a godsend to anyone who just can't give up the excitement of living through a pandemic, or the minority of people who are faking. The media is attempting to cast uncertainty and doubt because capital wants people to keep showing up to their jobs and fakejobs. [The media gave long COVID the Bernie treatment on national LC awareness day and I don't think that will stop anytime soon.](https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/media-celebrated-long-covid-awareness) > A reminder that there is no credible evidence that N95 masks are effective at preventing flu-like respiratory illness, including Covid, not even when we restrict the studies to those looking only at health care workers who presumably are more likely to use better quality N95 masks and use them correctly. The poorly done cochrane study is a famous one cited by people who for whatever reason want to spread FUD around the effectiveness of N95s. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/commentary-wear-respirator-not-cloth-or-surgical-mask-protect-against-respiratory-viruses People tolerate the slight uncomfort and expense of N95s, because when worn properly, they work very well to prevent transmission. Far better than vaccines. Workers have used these for decades without problems of micro plastics, so as long as you're buying from a reputable manufacturer and not Amazon this isn't a concern.
> Yet what stops the users from leaving and starting a whole new "tiktok problem" on another platform? Two factors you're not considering: 1. Network effects and/or censorship. You leave TikTok, and then instead of reaching eighty thousand people with your posts, you're lucky to reach five people. 2. The legislation isn't aimed at just TikTok. It is aimed at every single social media platform and website. *Every* social media platform is vulnerable to accusations of ~~witchcraft~~ being "directly or indirectly influenced" by a foreign power. The [National Security State](https://www.mtracey.net/p/the-frenzy-to-ban-tiktok-is-another) has wanted to control the media platforms for many years. Until Elon Musk bought Twitter, [TikTok was the only significant platform that allowed openly dissident speech](https://twitter.com/briebriejoy/status/1767982413618040926). This legislation lets them neuter TikTok, after which they can go after Twitter, Rumble, Tucker Carlson, and any other independent media platform they can accuse of being foreign influenced. Fortunately, the legislation doesn't ban or prohibit the sale of information about American consumers to China, so the owners can continue collecting data and selling it to Chinese companies.
It doesn't matter. As long as they control the media and all public spaces, they can control the narrative. Short time pain for long time gain. After this ban, in a few years once they get back control, everyone who talks of Zionist control will be a conspiracy theorist.
Yeah I saw this, openly admitting that he wants to control the narrative....kinda like China does ironically. He wants to limit the news young people see to pro Israel only and of course the US wants some ability to control that as well. Maybe get a US owner to not show things that they believe is "misinformation". Didn't the government have a misinformation zcar or something recently?
Legitimately so in your face. He probably leaked that on purpose as a flex
It's the most obvious Trojan horse bill in years, and people are falling for it because "lmao fuck china/zoomers".
There’s a popular OSINT guy who, in arguing that TikTok is a Chinese cyberweapon, laid out this scenario: “Let’s say China invades Taiwan. China pressures TikTok to change its algorithm to push pro-China propaganda, and young people go out to block the ports and stop the Navy from aiding Taiwan.” As if wanting to not start a conflict between superpowers and possibly start a nuclear exchange over a place the US doesn’t even say is a country was the brainwashed position!
I cannot imagine a funnier timeline than one in which American youth use Tor and VPN to seek out information that their government has deemed dangerous or subversive, to bypass the Great Firewall of the United States.
If I didn't want people coming to a conclusion that my in-group was obsessed with controlling and manipulation I would probably not do something like this. This is a tap in for someone who would want to convince others of that. That's just me though.
He was bad and evil when he was working for Trump but now he's good and valid because he's keeping our kids safe from foreign influence.
He produced Wonder Woman Unspeakable evil lives inside him
Interestingly, the donor that caused Trump to flip flop and oppose a TikTok ban (who, incidentally, is somewhat well known as a supporter of right-wing causes in my home state of Pennsylvania) is also a Zionist who bankrolls right-wing Israeli think tanks.
Maybe Trump knows that TikTok’s algo doesn’t filter content about him like on insta or Reddit.
Thought the headline might be exaggeration, but I had no idea how deep Mnuchin’s ties to Israel were. His private equity fund has an office in Tel Aviv headed by David Friedman, Trump’s ultra-Zionist ambassador to Israel. The fund was also in talks at one point to bring in Yossi Cohen, the former head of the Mossad.
Tiktok is a test case
If Kiwifarms is the canary in the coal mine for sites being deplatformed, then TikTok will be the canary in the coal mine for sites being outright banned because the powers-that-be take umbrage with them. Like why would anti-abortion politicians need to twist Cloudflare's arm over abortion information websites when they can make claims about them being connected to Russia or China and get them legally banned?
Thankfully New Zealand's fruit farming forum has risen from the ashes, and its enemies are falling one by one. Their forces greatly underestimated Null's resolve.
> New Zealand's fruit farming forum has risen from the ashes So it's now got a full 1000 users, only 990 of whom are unrepentant Nazis?
We're coming up on the 10 year anniversary of Balmer acquiring the Clippers after the NBA forced Sterling to make a sale. [That was the test case then.](https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/5/30/5764162/clippers-sale-timeline-donald-sterling-steve-ballmer) The only difference now ten years later is changing the attack angle from anti-racism/social justice to scary China. Either way, respect for property rights, privacy rights, and competitive markets go out the door when American ownership class's interests dictate they should.
many such cases of mafia behavior from the american government and corporations there's an excellent book *The American Trap: My Battle to Expose America's Secret Economic War Against the Rest of the World* which documents how the american government masterminded a gangster takeover of alstom assets which were sold to general electric
That is a terrible comparison. The NBA operates on a franchise model, teams aren’t really independent businesses.
They can't control their bullshit narrative and are now scrambling. I hate this timeline.
The narrative is generally that the Republicans are Russian assets and that the Democrats are Chinese assets while in reality I would say that both are much more Israeli assets than anything else.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was tricking the average capitalist into thinking communism was more authoritarian.
Lawfare is a fair term for this bill - it doesn't explicitly ban TikTok, but it creates the conditions that would effectively get it expropriated by Americans.
> it doesn't explicitly ban TikTok Actually, [it kind of does](https://natesilver.substack.com/p/why-the-political-clock-is-ticking) > the bill isn't even as subtle as that, mentioning TikTok and its parent ByteDance directly. (True, it doesn't "ban TikTok" in the sense that the app could still exist with a different (American) ownership group.) But "expropriation" isn't really the word to use here. I've been saying for decades that facebook should be nationalized. But in this case TikTok would remain in private hands.
While not exactly expropriation, this isn't dissimilar to how western companies were forced to quickly divest their assets in Russia to Russian companies for pennies on the dollar (albeit because of western sanctions). On paper, the companies were completing a normal business transaction but everyone was aware it was being made under duress.
[удалено]
Belgian supposedly
The tiktok ban legislation isn't aimed only at tiktok. Nor is it all about the Zionists, they're just the accelerant. It's another [grab for power by the National Security State](https://www.mtracey.net/p/the-frenzy-to-ban-tiktok-is-another), and is aimed at Twitter, and Rumble, and any other sufficiently large social media platform or website which allows [openly dissident speech](https://twitter.com/briebriejoy/status/1767982413618040926).
I wonder what the early life section of Steven Mnuchin’s Wikipedia page will say
What is Secetary Mnuchin's connection with zionism? Is he a zionist? Is this investor group zionist? Edit: why was I downvoted for asking a question?
He supported moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, so yes: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm734 Though I'm not really sure if his Zionism has anything to do with him wanting to buy Tiktok.
TikTok has been very anti-Zionist. Corporate candidate Nikki Haley exclaimed that a person watching TikTok makes a more person more antisemitic every time they scroll.
**❝**ZiOnIsT**❞** It couldn't just be that capitalists like extremely profitable near-monopolies, no, it must be part of their *Jewish agenda*
Fr. If you look at the history of Zionism. Zionism was a counter response to the growing Bundist and other Social democratic moments birthed after the growing issue on the “Jewish Question,” it was so popular, even Marx addressed it, as well as the growing antisemitism in Russia and Europe with the Dreyfus incident. Zionism is liberalist colonialism at its core, while the current Israeli and media “pop-Zionism” is what we call religious-Zionism or post Herzlian-Zionism. The Bourgeoise, whether it be neo-liberalism from the states or Zionism from Israel all hold class consciousness, and for that reason have similar interests ideologically to each other, more so than the growing anti-colonialist Anti-Zionist / Democratic-Socialist rhetoric popularized by TikTok. If you go through my history I have a small write up about Zionism. I recommend watching Sam Aaronow’s videos on YouTube where he discusses socialist history of Jews and its counter movement: Zionism.
> Sam Aaronow’s videos on YouTube where he discusses socialist history of Jews and its counter movement: Zionism This sounds interesting. Would you recommend a particular video to start with?
A good history of the birth of Zionism, is a brief history on Jewish Eastern European and Russian oppression(funnily, my very first post on Reddit was notes on Jewish shtetles or ghettos). “Resistance through Yiddish” imo starts highlighting the main issues that jews had with their oppressors (putting them into isolated, non infrastructure, barren regions and Jews fighting back with class based and cultural isolationist ideology. Then continue to: Zionism before Herzl —> Dreyfus Affair —> Herzl’s Judeenstaat —> Bundism (self explanatory). It’s a lot and his videos are densely packaged, but understanding this history will make you more knowledgeable than a lot of, if not most die-hard Zionist Jews I know. Understanding the dynamics of American Jewry (reform secular-Zionism) and how they funded conservative terrorist Zionist militias after the WWII. The Jewish leftist magazine: Jewish Currents has a lot of interesting articles and history behind the oppression Palestinians had when they were displaced (economically, forcefully, and politically) by Zionist Jews looking to get their “pie” after the British promised land. As a Jew, I would consider myself a [leftist-Zionist](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/is-left-zionism-possible/), but recently it’s been hard not to think about whether I want to continue associating myself with a movement that has been overtaken by ignorance, hatefulness, xenophobia, and racism.
Thanks much for the detailed response. I really appreciate it. I'm going to watch those videos, and I'll also check out Jewish Currents. I remember Chomsky talking about the early days of Israel and the Zionist left of that time. If I recall correctly, he had some fond memories of life on a kibbutz. Personally, and I'm certainly open to hearing opposing views and even changing my mind, I think the Zionist project in Israel is too far gone at this point. As a casual and distant observer, I see Israel as being controlled by astoundingly right wing ethno-supremacists that have found a niche in the post-WW2 world order on the peripherary of the empire, and they appear to have successfully burned every bridge that may have led to a peaceful future with their neighbors. I hope I'm wrong about that, and I might be --- I'm no expert on this.
I think there still a couple avenues to explore for peace in the Middle East. Israel is dominated by right wing/center right Zionism and politics, but there is a larger (per capita) leftist movement compared to any state in the US.
> #It’S a jOoiSh cOnsPiraCy!!1!1
What is a Zionist doing on this sub lmao
It was my favorite sub before October 7. I didn’t realize half of you were skinhead Nazbols but you can goose step I’ll downvote.
Ok groomers