Quote (thesnipa @ Sep 6 2024 01:28pm)
well i'd make 2 points:
1. it does go both ways, just not purely. all of right winged media claimed for MONTHS that the censorship of the weiner and hunter laptops swung literal elections. of course in the case of the Biden laptop this is because countless voter fraud allegations went no where and they needed a tangible story for how they lost and can still call the election a sham without anything related to voting machines or actual vote counts. all this to say its the same behavior "here's why i lost and its unfair", the dems blame russia the gop blames the deep state. no one actually loses a fair election these days it seems. cowards ofc.
2. i dont think its exactly that china owns us, i think its just a series of DEEPLY vested interest that goes both ways. its one of the few bright spots i see in the rise of BRICS. china is steering that ship and as of yet china can not exist in a world where the US declines without them suffering even worse consequences. they've already had to resort to deeply authoritarian population control tactics to maintain a grasp on their population. they'll hit the boomer retirement demands stage and struggle just like us only with a population 3x our size. and they have yet to find a market for their goods that doesnt include a healthy EU and US. im more troubled by chinese investment in US real estate than i am in either china sea expansion or potential election interference. we cant do as much to stop them controlling as we can to stop them literally owning us. the day they take hold of all soybean and pig production stateside we're going to see a serious issue, because then they're closer to self reliance using our country as a producer in the same way we outsourced all manufacturing over there. and they're sadly too close to that for comfort, figures i read had them owning something like 33% of all us pig production already, thats scary.
This is a real deciding mechanism though, that's the thing. What Russia does is a drop in a bucket compared to the impact the collective MSM does when they spam the airwaves 24/7 that Trump is a Russian agent for years, or that he is a sexist, racist, felon, "weird" whatever other new smear that's cocked and ready to go seemingly every few months. There's also the FBI/NSA/CIA/state department that do actually put their hands on the scales. Mostly in very opaque ways we'll never know, sometimes that shit comes out, with how the FBI suppressed the laptop story and explicitly reached out to FB/other social media on eve of the election. This isn't conspiracy, it's proven because Zuck himself acknowledged it, Musk himself acknowledged agencies influence in Twitter before he took over.
Point is, they aren't remotely even in the same ball park of importance. One is megaphoned and has very marginal impact, the other is real.
As far as China, yes i would say our relationship is symbiotic but that doesn't mean our politicians and centers of real power are somehow not influenced by them. We keep focusing on things like election interfering, but their influence and lobbying power is much deeper and powerful, not limited to presidential elections but probably impacting us in a much more granular way, in banks, in corporations, in government at lower levels, in intel agencies. You don't need to hack or buy some rand alt-journalists when you're already influencing media, agencies, etc.