Republicans are all up in arms over . . . mass killings? Inflation? Climate Change? The Banking System? No, it is TikTok. As I understand it TikTok is a very popular (with the younger set) social media site which publishes videos of young people dancing, puppies and kittens playing, you know the stuff.
The Republicans have their knickers in a twist because the Chinese are data mining TikTok! Imagine, data mining a social media site! Who do they think they are, Facebook?
Well, the Repubs are seeing this site as a dagger aimed at American Democracy! The Chinese could institute an insidious campaign to turn our young against their elders, against . . .gasp . . . democracy! (As if Donald Trump weren’t doing a good enough job of that!)
I am assuming this is just another round in the Republicans distraction campaign. If they were serious, they would look at how China controls TikTok in China.
China is actually loosening its restrictions on young people TikToking (is that a word?). On March 1, TikTok announced that it’s setting a 60-minute default time limit per day for users under 18. Those under 13 would need a code entered by their parents to have an additional 30 minutes, while those between 13 and 18 can make that decision for themselves. This is less stringent than they had before. The Chinese aren’t worried that the site will undermine Chinese ideology, they are concerned that it is a GWOT (giant waste of time) keeping their youths away from tasks more important: household chores, homework, you know, important things.
The Republicans aren’t interested in TikTok wasting youth’s time excessively. They don’t mind that kids don’t study. The less well educated the youth of this country are, the better they like it. (And going to college is the Highway to Atheism!) Ignorant people are easier to manipulate and make more passive employees.
No, the Republicans need something to do . . . instead of work on the real problems facing this country. When do the Hunter Biden hearings start? And I want to see what the Repubs will do about TikTok before the Chinese find out our youth likes videos of puppies playing more than of kittens playing. Think of the leverage they will have then.
Postscript There was an episode of The Twilight Zone (original series) in which aliens created a family game that was very, very popular and their intent was that the game would affect human psyches. You see, the game was designed so that if you lost you won. They were teaching humans to lose! They were softening us up for their invasion. Maybe the Republicans saw this episode when they were young.
Requiem for the American Dream—Must See TV
Tags: class warfare, Corporate Greed, corruption, Noam Chomsky, obscene wealth, politics, tax the rich
I watched this documentary last night on Amazon Prime (it is available on YouTube also). It was made in 2015 and I can’t see how I could have missed it. It involves a running commentary, actually taken over several years, by Noam Chomsky and the topic was how we got to where we are now, politically and economically.
Professor Chomsky has an encyclopedic knowledge of current affairs, history, and many other topics so he is able to put things together quite beautifully. (I am a fan, btw.)
If you have followed this blog for a long while you will hear topics I have addressed a fair number of times, the basic issue is not a battle royale between conservatives and liberals, as we have been led to believe, but between those who possess much wealth and the rest of us. This battle has been going on for as long as this country has existed and goes much further back into quite ancient history.
Here are some tastes: Bank regulation developed after the Great Depression and coming out of the New Deal meant there were no bank or market crashes of any note through the 1950’s and 1960’s. Now they have become a feature of our economy (guess why), so much so that business insurers are factoring in the taxpayer bailouts that will unfailingly accompany such a crash in their calculations.
Economists developed their theories based upon “informed consumers making rational choices” yet advertisers are operating to create “uniformed consumers making irrational choices” . . . and we are allowing our politicians to hire advertising and marketing consultants to run our political campaigns.
The masterminds on the side of the wealthy are attacking solidarity every chance they get. They do not want people to feel solidarity behind public schools, for example, they want us to feel it is “every man for himself.” The same is with race relations, women’s rights, etc. They certainly do not want labor unions empowered by solidarity to oppose anything rich businessmen want to do.
And to reinforce that this is not a conservative-liberal battle, Chomsky points out that both conservatives and liberals were adamantly against people of the common sort being involved in politics. Most were in favor of putting us back “in our place” to allow the wealthy to run the country properly. (They, both conservatives and liberals, actually allowed themselves to be quoted for publication saying such things, so you know they were feeling privileged, and probably paid, to do so.)
The most repeated comment was “When you allow the wealthy to become powerful, what did you expect to happen?”)
These are just a few of the many points made in this documentary.
If you are not up to speed as to what is really going on now, this is an excellent way to catch up, as it were. Highly, highly recommended. I will watch it again in a few days to catch what I missed.