Wow, thank you for the effort in typing out that this synopsis! Seems like quite the compelling read.

I have already retrieved the book & will start it tonight.

One of the joys of poetry is that it can contain multiple hard-to-describe facets of the same concept.

* The revolution won't be televised because they won't show it to you.

* The revolution won't be televised because it's not a passive, external experience that you just consume.

* The revolution won't be televised because it starts inside yourself.

Yes man you got it.

That's clever.

Most of which had, in fact, no basis in truth. So no that’s nothing like the Mexican election.

Not sure why this is getting down voted. I remember how masks were proclaimed to be ineffective. I remember how masks were suddenly effective, but only available for medical personnel. Then when masks were available for everyone, they became mandated.

> More often than not, the opposite is true,

Interestingly enough, it doesn't matter in the slightest if some times the excuse is actually true. The intuition is good to have at all times, as Intel's founder Andy Grove used to say - "Only the paranoid survive".

> hence the existence of Occam's razor.

Occam's razor has nothing to do with the topic at hand, you're probably thinking of Hanlon's razor which is a dumb idea 99% of the time, regardless of what actually produced it - stupidity or malice.

There is no way to know if you are applying Occam's razor correctly because we always have invisible cultural assumptions that are hard to escape.

Relevant story: my mother grew up in the Soviet Block where they taught her about American Segregation in elementary school. She said she and all her friends immediately dismissed it as made-up propaganda

In that case she was wrong. But I think the intuition is the correct "rule of thumb" to take. By your application of Occam's razor, you would end up believing most propaganda the Soviet education system pushed as long as it offered a simpler explanation. I don't think that's a good intuition to have either.

> Then about ten years ago things changed.

No, they didn't.

We had McCarthy in the 50s. We had Focus on the Family and the Catholic League getting shows canceled. The Simpsons had a public feud with George Bush Sr.

Cancel culture long predates the internet. Hell, it predates humans; plenty of other species kick antisocial members out of group gatherings.

This has been proven wrong again and again. My grandparents were subsistence farmers. They had much less material wealth than any working class American and the vast majority of unhoused Americans. Yet, I can assure you that back then they were much more satisfied with life than the vast majority of working class and unhoused americans today. Second point, no amount of material wealth can compensate for severe mental illness. When people have severe mental illness, medical interventions must be performed against their diminished "free will." For those of you of American descent ask your parents or grand parents how their grand parents lived. I am certain you will be shocked at their extreme poverty and general hopefulness. Conclusion: once basic needs are met, the perception of "material" is more important than the material.

> What you're describing here (ironically) is unironically the basis for Western political thought.

It's not just "western" political thought if such a thing even exists. It's political thought.

For example, Japan's stated goal in ww2 was to liberate asia from european invaders. They portrayed themselves as the good guys. The liberators. That's true for every empire and war in history, "western" or "eastern" or "northern" or "southern". It was always the self-proclaimed "good guys" fighting self-proclaimed "good guys". The winner gets to keep the "good guy" handle while the loser gets assigned the "bad guy" handle.

Had japan won ww2, that's how history would have taught ww2. Instead, japan lost and the US won and hence we get to claim to be the good guys while japan does not.

It's one thing to analyze the world with this lens, which is perfectly fine, as long as it's part of a bigger analysis. But materialist views have never stopped the boot. Materialist political ideology has produced some of the finest jack boots history has seen.

i personally find presenting a black and white "it's either one way or the other" perspective to be problematic.

yes, materialism and cause and effect etc. etc. agreed on that. it is a thing. interestingly though, as people sit static and just work on becoming more aware of that feedback loop you mentioned it can lead to people trying to not be so much of an arsehole -- through refraining from doing a thing -- because they can see their part in causing things to happen in the world. and that's not just limited to immediate surroundings. i know that i affect everything with every action i do (or do not do).

idealism becomes useful at that point. it can provide people with a set of loose guidelines on how to "not be an arsehole" aka how to not affect everything in a way that's going to cause problems.

the problems come when people do idealism without being aware of that materialistic feedback loop. they're usually doing it out of rule based dogma based on tribalism. sometimes it's "we're better than you are" or sometimes it's "outsiders are not welcome".

caveat: this is all just my personal experience, but i think it would scale if enough people became aware that their actions matter and have profound consequences, so try to not be an arsehole to anyone today

Marxism, a materialist ideology, is western political thought as well.

Do you condone all actions made by all people claiming to be part of your party? We're all told that we must pick the "lesser evil", and if you truly believe that one particular issue is more important than the rest, is it not your moral obligation to pursue that?

You can pretty much lump all of the billionaire bootlickers in the same category. Almost none of them have any ethics, whilst of course proclaiming the opposite.

The persecution of Uighurs continues apace. Even if it is not allowed to be called genocide on TikTok. The political elements to this are pretty obvious, but conflating two terrible Minneapolis ICE killings in 3 weeks to the horror that occurred in Xinjiang is beyond the pale. While we may go down the authoritarian path with a Clown King, we're still at least 10-15 years behind China.

https://www.rfa.org/english/uyghur/2024/11/05/uyghur-tiktok-...

China: for Taiwan, they are in the planning phase. (Vietnam, Hong Kong, Tibet, Aksai Chin, Korea, Scarborough Shoal do not count in your view of course). Not saying they are worse than the US.

You should see how some people justify Tibet..

Propaganda can be entirely factual. In fact, the best propaganda is.

I mean China is not exactly a poster child for a benevolent hegemon - tibet / taiwan / uyghurs to name a few

> TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos.

I am responding to the fact US TikTok does not show videos of an armored vehicle driving through a crowd of protesters standing in front of it like the lone man in Tiananmen Square. They are being removed.

This ability to control what information TikTok users are presented with is the reason TikTok was originally banned in the United States.

I am being objective discussion how TikTok is being used as a propaganda tool whether or not I personally agree with China influencing people in South America or whether or not what the United States government is doing to protestors is good or bad. I'm not putting a value on it. I'm pointing out that when I'm in South America and someone links a video in a text message and I start to doom scroll after a while I will start to be introduced to videos of the Unites States government committing violence against Spanish speaking people.

> might be immensely popular in South America

Objectively the current United States regime was hugely popular in Spanish speaking countries like it was in Spanish speaking Florida. Up until a couple months ago, people would tell me how much they support and admire the current regime in the United States. That has changed recently which likely has to do with the content they receive via TikTok which is controlled by the Chinese government which is why it was banned in the United States. After being sold, it is not surprising that the United States is using it the way they accused the Chinese of using it.

I'm in South America.

If I doom scroll TikTok without cookies from a residence in South America, after a while, I will be presented with anti American propaganda showing videos of recent events or people speaking in Spanish about the atrocities that the United States is committing against Spanish speaking people that is recent.

I'm am describing objectively what I see.

The United States didn't want TikTok controlling what is visible to people in the United States so they banned TikTok. Later the United States offered allowing it to be sold to an American company.

Currently, there are two extremely influential forces for people under 25 years old in Spanish speaking Latin America, TikTok, a Chinese company, and an American music artist, Bad Bunny, who likely is the single most influential person in the Spanish speaking world. Let's stay tuned for the Superbowl.

The news only dropped about 5 days ago about the US partnership. Its still a Chinese app. Now the deal with Oracle will have them designing the algo, storing US users data, and doing US moderation. It wasn't this way before.

key word is "search," tianamen square will never be recommended in a feed. This is the illusion of "choice." Most people think they can "train" their feed, this is not true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbMRywfYiM8&t=105s

e:

1. tracking string removed per request.

2. it's a video of a WCCO news (local MSP TV station) segment which shows an armored vehicle pushing protesters out of the way.

How can you say the Chinese "haven't"? They've been using soft power for some time with Venezuela. They've been importing Venezuelan oil. They have been making loans as well. The loans a are a huge part of "soft power". They've also replaced a lot of items impacted by Trump's tariffs from South America.

Sounds like you're in agreement with the parent - outside the US, people see content that reflects poorly on the US, and which is blocked for US citizens

If I was a foreign government I would promote division. For the left promote anti-center truth. For the right, anti-center truth. For the center, anti-wing truth. Recommendation systems do this automatically, they are inherently anti-social. This power needs to be controlled domestically were we can force changes to algorithms if needed.

Wasn't there something about the algorithm pushing brainrot to US audiences while Chinese users got more educational/high quality content? Turning Americans stupid might count.

China is less interested in turning Americans into carriers of the red banner, and more interested in sowing political discord and instability. Just like Russia was doing in 2016, creating faux Bernie rallies and organizing them across the street from faux Trump rallies.

2) Why?

I think some people live in movies where the bad guy always loses. Reality doesn't work this way. Bad situations where information is denied from people can last lifetimes.

With modern technology we may be creating systems that end up imprisoning our minds for generations with no escape because you'll be killed the moment your technological monitor realizes you're going to fight back.

The general problem is that people think based on relativity.

Suppose there are thousands of law enforcement officials in the US, some minority of them are violent offenders and as a result of that some minority of police shootings are murders rather than legitimate self-defense or protection of the innocent, where the number of annual illegitimate police shootings is somewhere between 2 and 999, and the propensity for those people to be prosecuted is lower than it ought to be. Suppose further that China has over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps and is using them as slave labor and subjecting them to forced sterilization.

Is the first one bad? Yes. Is it as bad? Uh, no. But you can present a distorted picture through selective censorship.

Obviously what you want is for neither of them to be censored, but not wanting a foreign power to be the ones who decide what people see is fully legitimate.

It’s more sinister than simple censorship.

The point is brainwashing.

I mean, they say it’s not censorship when it’s not the government doing it even when the government has embeds with “suggestions” ala facebook, twitter and reddit somewhere around 2020…

Case-in-point of why we shouldn't have approached China like we did over the last few decades. It normalized totalitarianism in some segments of Western society.

> Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship"

It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do.

This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks.

It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons.

The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)

> TikTok is known for tipping the scales on political keywords everywhere.

All social media does this. Even HN (through its users flagging articles). This article will be flagged by users and removed from the front page very soon, just as a similar one[1] was already.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777652

Well, yes, China doesn't have open media for its citizens. Chinese people will on average be less well informed about China, even accounting for the extent of Americans who choose trashy propaganda channels.

(reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have told me to stop posting")

Well you could say that every educated country is far better informed about the US than vice versa.

except with a different brand of fascism.

Knowing is not enough.

We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation, yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced it.

The population of the DPRK think they are, and it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Out of curiosity. What do those videos mean to an average Chinese person?

What are the opinions of illegal immigration over there? How do they police it? (If at all).

Does this look like normal government activity? Or are they appalled at the lack of “freedoms” in America?

I am truly naive on their culture or politics around this and how they would use it to show the US as boogeymen government and how their government is better. Is it a grass isn’t always greener type thing for them or is it a way to actually think we’re evil and should be stopped.

> Do you think anti-ICE videos are being blocked in China?

Of course not, but other stuff is.

Interestingly, my understanding is government pressure forces Douyin to be more "positive" and "encouraging" than Tiktok (i.e. outrage is an easy way drive engagement with obvious negative externalities, and that path is blocked).

probably not, in fact, the CCP likes to promote content that shows the "US in disarray", while simultaneously censoring and suppressing any content that is critical of the CCP or that exposes its bad actions

Interesting. How is it implemented? I opened Tiktok here in Denmark and went to something I, assume, would be in the US and it seems to load fine for me? Do you an example of something I shouldn't be able to view so I can try?

I’m not condoning censorship. It’s bad.

I’m saying it’s silly hyperbole to make the leap to implying that only people in other countries have easy access to information.

These absurd claims always turn into a game of motte and bailey when they’re called out, with retreats to safer claims. I’m talking about the original claim, that “people in other countries” have easy access to this information which we, in the US, see everywhere all the time right now (except TikTok apparently).

I think you’re greatly overestimating the number of people who only use one social media platform and never check any other news source at all.

TikTok users are also known for being experts at evading filters and censors. Remember the rising popularity of “unalived” when talk of suicide was filtered out on the platform?

I’m not saying this ICE censorship is good, because it’s not! I’m saying it’s ridiculous to claim that only people in other countries have easy access to information.

We were so naive in the 2000s. 'Tech will democratize everything' forgetting they will just flood us with bullshit so that nothing means anything.

>I just don't think you're paying attention

Alternate explanation: they are paying intense attention... to the palms that are pressed desperately against their eye sockets as they attempt to See No Evil.

I was able to find this pretty quickly:

Zhang Youxia Arrested After Failed Coup; Gunfight Allegedly Occurred at Jingxi Hotel in Western Beijing (https://www.peoplenewstoday.com/news/en/2026/01/25/1130776.h...)

Most Americans are unaware of how China is collapsing. All news is censored.

TikTok was the only popular platform where you could doomscroll and see bad things the US is doing. All others censored it to please the administration. And now TikTok does too.

Forcing the sale of TikTok predates the current war in Gaza by a good bit. It's obviously a complex thing that encompassed a bunch of different people with different motivations. And considering there is pro-Palestinian videos all over American social media, I don't think it is kind of absurd to think this was the motivation.

One is clearly worse than the other on some issues — only one of them executed US citizens in the street for protesting, during both terms.

>I'm not sure why the meme on the right is that the left wants to protect Biden or anyone else.

No, the point isn't "protecting Biden", it's pure self interest. Tiktok is a social media platform that's very popular with Democrat's electorate and is already left leaning. Why risk it falling into the other party's control (especially near the end of Biden's term), just so you can maybe push more left leaning talking points?

The bad guys would have done it anyway. That's the important part. "Good guys shouldn't make tools because bad guys might (or will) use them" isn't how we should operate. No more should we say "the [internet|source code|pen testing tools|etc] could be used by bad guys so good guys shouldn't have it."

"The current iteration of ICE…"

Just murdered two protestors. A bit of a change there.

//

I am willing to bet that the vast majority of young people are very much aware of what ICE has been doing. Do you believe otherwise?

I would be remiss I didn’t suggest everyone go watch the Watchmen series on HBO

a surprising amount of people seem to genuinely believe law enforcement (generally, not just police) is at its core based on discretionary actions guided by their moral values and not a morally neutral action upholding agreed upon contracts

that is to say, the law only applies to you if you do "bad" things. and ill be honest, there is a level of truth to this to me. from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen. The underlying core social contract does appear to be one of "if you do 'good' things, generally the law will agree with you and if it doesnt then we wont hold it against you the first time"

*the important caveat here is that this leaves a rather disgustingly large and exploitable gap in what is considered good vs bad behavior, with some people having biases that can spin any observable facts into good or bad based on their political agenda. Additionally, personal biases like racism for example, influence this judgement to value judge your actions in superficial ways

They are acting with the expectation that Democrats are too spineless to do anything because thats all they have seen their entire lives and they are probably right.

People rarely recognize that force can be turned on them until it happens. If one side uses force and the other refuses to, you cannot expect the first to grasp that force is always a two way street, because for them it is not real until they feel it.

People who care about their community?

There's going to be a lot of pressure on Democrats from their base to hold people accountable for what happens during Trump's 2nd term. And there is going to be some new blood that runs on that. You have state governors like Newsom, Pritizker and Waltz documenting abuses with future accountability in mind.

What baffles me is how conservatives supporting the current government overreach aren't worried about the coming backlash. Do they think they'll just win all the future elections? Even when there is no more Trump?

"Why would anyone be opposed to deporting criminals" is verbatim what I've read from conservative commenters.

That isn't the issue being discussed. This is illustrating that armed, masked goons as a political weapon is a pandora's box that will get turned against everyone, regardless of status. Some people just don't care about the violence in Minnesota because it isn't happening to them.

> Why would anyone be opposed to the IRS catching tax cheats? This seems like such a bone-headed take.

And ICE says they only go after illegals.

Speaking of historically illiterate...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

> Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.

There's nothing wrong with catching tax cheats as long as due process is followed and the person's rights are not infringed. However, selective enforcement can be used as a weapon - never investigate people "on your side" and always investigate "enemies" even if there's no evidence of fraud. Another way to weaponise enforcement is to have a law that is almost never prosecuted and rarely followed (e.g. only using bare hands to eat chicken in Gainesville, Georgia), so then a law enforcement officer can threaten to prosecute for it unless the victim complies.

I feel like you can both want illegal aliens to get deported, but not approve of how ICE is executing protesters in the street, entering homes without warrants, and kidnapping people in unmarked vans.

Similarly, you can think it would be good to catch tax fraud, but think that it should be handled without executing folks.

> infamously against “Tea Party” activists

that claim was disproved by the way

but, it is famously how the feds managed to get Al Capone

No, they went after tax cheats and it wound up that there were a lot more people cheating taxes hiding behind conservative-sounding fronts than there were hiding behind liberal-sounding fronts.

This was spun as "targeting conservatives".

I think this take is on the cynical side. A more charitable interpretation would be what they say (but maybe I'm being naive): that they don't want to break the rules to fix what someone else broke by breaking the rules.

I'm not sure what you mean by "they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against" -- if you mean the Republicans manage to get some Democrats to "switch sides" -- it's important to remember that this is how everything used to get done. Check the old votes: party-line was less common back in the day. And even now, Democrats tolerate members with differing opinions far more than the GOP does, and it shows in their voting patterns.

I don't think its any sort of "grand struggle" in any sense other than the human condition is a grand struggle for peace in a world which perhaps fundamentally encourages conflict, but it doesn't have to be a grand struggle to appreciate the fact that people are dying and being treated inhumanely.

I really do think you're fundamental warning is spot on: people really should consider how power is going to be used against them when calculating how much of it to give up in the pursuit of a goal. I also happen to think its sort of ridiculous (and impossible) for us all to wail and gnash our teeth each time a person dies unjustly. But I also think its probably wrong to be amused by it, even if it is commonplace in human affairs.

Yeah.

I don't subscribe to the hypocritical vies that people are expected to have "free will" and "freedom", while also being "influenced by the algorithm".

Its either one or the other. Personally I think its the former, and Tik Tok is just confirming to people what they want to hear.

The mechanism to do it properly is the feds working with local and state officials where there's a full breadth of accountability and judicial coverage. Some states and cities have explicitly rejected doing this, some opting to purposefully make it harder. Trump instead of being diplomatic and trying to work with them has aggressively sent goons in to do flashy operations and pushed federal enforcement to the limits of the law.

ICE and border patrol wasn't really designed either legally or in training for these sorts of large operations, so it's created lots of dangerous situations like how to do crowd control broadly under laws like "interfering with a federal investigation", while commanders are pushing them hard for results.

The audio is really strange, have people tested it with similar sounding videos without ungoodthink?

I said you were right. You might need to go touch grass man.

[Edit]: I shouldn't have made the "touch grass" comment. Sorry.