I'm not American. But couldn't this being held due to the mid terms? It already looks bad as is, but if inflation started escalating immediately with the conflict (or more than it is) wouldn't it make it for for electoral purposes?
Let’s take a basic example: Wikipedia, which hosts pornography, easily could be a target of such legislation. Now there is infrastructure in place to know when you read about “Criticisms of policy X” and maybe it’s handled safely or maybe it’s handed directly to the government.
What about news? It’s a hop skip and leap from “age verify pornography with ID” to “age verify content about sexual abuse or violence.” Now the infrastructure is in place to see the alt-news criticisms you read.
Twitch or YouTube wouldn’t even wait to comply, ID verification is something that these corporations are already perfectly fine with. Now, you watching a history of your government’s crimes is a potentially tracked red flag that you’re a dissident to be watched.
Do you think if this sort of legislation is enacted, it will stop at large websites? It will be an excuse used by the government and supported by big tech firms to shut down any small websites which don’t comply. After all, Google, MS, et al, they would rather that your entire concept of the internet start and end in a service they control.
Don’t you think that it’s a signal that the last major event you can point to is decades old?
Others may say “what about Uighurs?” or “what about Hong Kong?” but I think that the rest of the world is not doing all that much better on terms of civil repression.
In the UK, you can be arrested for voicing disagreement with the rationale for another person’s arrest (not generally, but on a specific hot button issue they’d rather not anyone talk about). French politicians are attempting to make illegal criticism of Israel, carte blanche. Don’t even get me started on Germany, which is so self-shamed from the last century they have overcorrected into legitimating an external state above all else. Across the pond, you hardly even have to convince anyone that it’s on the downtrend, unless they’re 30% of the population who believe the Don is christ alive (but don’t like if he says it).
The world is very unstable at this point and China is a country that strongly values and incentivizes stability, at the expense of individual rights. This is contra a lot of the west which is both unstable and actively undermining individual rights.
Oh, sure, putting a million or more Uyghurs in internment camps, sterilizing people, and trying to systematically erase a culture and a religion is "just as repressive" as the what is happening in Europe, as long you one is willing to ignore nearly everything relevant about the scale, recourse, and consequence of the PRCs atrocities.
Also, reducing Germany’s complex, decade-long process of grappling with the Holocaust as "self-shame" is... a choice.
I love this concept. I was recently thinking about how I used to be able to skip from one channel to another when an ad break came on. I would love the harness on a smart device to be like this so that I may switch between the Hulu and Netflix apps at will. Why should I have to restart the app each time I navigate in? Why do the apps even know that I am switching around?
The point the OP is making is not about the justification used by the US Admin, but instead a point about how when a country has nuclear weapons, they are typically not invaded, because you risk those weapons being used. NK developed a weapon and has some degree of safety from direct invasion.
Since it developed nuclear weapons, Israel has never been invaded by a foreign country. Israel launched the 1967 war, and in 1973, Egypt only attacked occupied Egyptian territory. Same for Syria.
The fact that the 1973 war only occurred in Egyptian and Syrian territory actually had a major impact on how other other countries reacted to it.
Even the US - Israel's main backer - basically treated Egyptian and Syrian war aims as legitimate.
There is a widespread belief that Israel would have used nuclear weapons if the Syrians and Egyptians had broken through to Israeli territory, and that this was one of the major American motivations for resupplying the Israelis during the war.
At some point, one should ask oneself, “is fully breaking the system the point?”
In the recent Epstein releases, Epstein told Thiel that the best deals come from a system on the way to collapse. I think at this point it’s reasonable to consider that this is what Trump and his allies are trying to do. Crash the US economy so severely that they might use their ill-gotten wealth to buy an outsized portion of it.
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