I'm also a little unclear on which liberties are essential, versus those that are merely nice to have. We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.
But when you ban something 9 figures of people happily use, with some small chunk of that even being people making a living off of it, people will care about that because it directly and visibly affects them.
Are the congressmen so incompetent that they didn't see this coming? This backfired horribly for them in multiple ways... unless this was somehow part of a master plan my simple mind can't comprehend?
Did it somehow not backfire and I'm just being led to believe so?
The elite have always known the value of media and propaganda. TikTok could easily sway electorate decision making in the same way as Meta, X, and YouTube. The US oligarchs have no control over a sizable social media platform. The data security and privacy concerns are theater. The very same logic we use for TikTok applies to our own apps and social media. The only distinction is the false premise they have our interests in mind.
Are congressmen this incompetent? Yes. Are they bought by adversaries? Yes. Are they just humans who are as equally manipulated as you? Yes.
Did Trump get more money? Yes. Plan success.
Foreign governments not so much.
The issue is a foreign government having access to that data, to installed software on millions of phones, and foreign control of the primary information source for tens of millions of Americans.
Because, and I hate to say it, they're our snooping government agencies. I'd rather it be them that have access to all my data than the CCP apparatus.
If person A says "X implies Y", then person B points out that X would also imply obvious nonsense Z, it doesn't mean that B is saying Y and Z are the same, or even that Y isn't true. They're just pointing out that X is too general to possibly be true.
This essential liberty was freedom from being killed. Pretty fucking essential.
We give up that right in exchange for the permanent safety that a government is supposed to grant. Life is presumably more fundamental than money, but if it's the only truly essential liberty, there is a lot of room to give up others.
Homeowners have some power. But if the government really needs to (modern example includes building a new railway), They can elect to forcibly pay you and seize it (eminent domain).
>We all give up the liberty of driving on the wrong side of the road, and nobody seems to mind.
Auto transportation was never a right to begin with. As inconvenient as it is, you are free to walk wherever you want without trespassing. Even across a road. But there's a line when you start to simply endanger others by say, walking on a road at 5 mph.