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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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I feel very differently. I don't like China's government and I would hate to live in China, but at the same time, I definitely view the US government spying on me as being more dangerous than China spying on me. After all, I am a US citizen, so it is very unlikely that China would do anything to me no matter what kind of information they had on me. The US government, on the other hand, could do all sorts of things to me.

I mean, there's the "how sure are you that you are immune to tailored propaganda" issue and there's the "how sure are you that they can't figure out something to blackmail you with" issue. But those aren't the big points. The big points are:

  1. If the CPC says TikTok will be a malware vector, it will be a malware vector. A state-level malware vector, at that, which means zero-days and probably hardware/firmware backdoors (do you own any computing devices made in Mainland China?).
  2. You might not care about what the CPC knows about you, but what the CPC knows about the Chinese diaspora matters to you because knowing whether a given expat is toeing the party line is a key part of being able to control him by threatening his family, and you want there to be less enemy agents in the USA (there will be some anyway, but TikTok is more scalable).

Chinese families are small due to low TFR and chinamen make good immigrants- it is trivial to grant visas to all the clan of chinamen in the west whose enemy agent status actually matters.

That only solves the problem if both they want to come and the CPC lets them come. Obviously, by the point of them being explicitly hostages, the CPC wouldn't let them emigrate.

‘Chinese expats or their children being granted a security clearance or background checked for sensitive work are asked to provide a list of relatives who will immediately be granted visas upon completion of the process’ seems to solve the process- presumably the CCP isn’t preemptively taking hostages. It’s just when they need something. And these kinds of security checks already ask to disclose ties to foreign nationals and discriminate in otherwise unconstitutional ways- it’s not a huge stretch.

In any case, orientals in general seem to love America even before you get to the ‘totalitarian polluted and poor’ aspect of red China; I have a hard time imagining grandma and brother in law are passing up an opportunity to move and massively increase their standard of living.

Yes, I didn't articulate the point as well as I could. I think the best I could say is this: every bit of excess data collection by the US government is horrifying, as is all of that with regard to Five Eyes. Nominally about terrorism, maybe they've even stopped a fair bit, but I do often wonder if it's the NSA more and less behind the hacks of conservative websites and if it's also the NSA carrying out doxxes of certain individuals before laundering it through chosen contacts for parallel constructions.

Still, however dark the purposes are of our government as they collect such data, the severity is matched and multiplied when asking: but why does China want it?

It could be reciprocity, if the US government maintains a database of every single Chinese citizen. Do we? I think I would have heard that as a retort, "The US government is doing the same thing with Chinese citizens" is, to me, much stronger than mentioning USFG domestic surveillance. To the point I would consider it entirely exculpating if we did it first.

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