But China does "research", where everything happens at the behest, and for the glory of, the CCP.

Totally agree this is a problem.

Another issue is that I find myself perpetually turning subtitles off. They're on by default pretty much everywhere, and it's just a pain to dig through a new system to turn them off on someone's account. And then they switch back on after a system update. My guess is that a bunch of people cannot be bothered.

I've never had good experiences with snaps. For a while I used to run a cron job that deleted "$HOME/snap". That worked pretty well for a time, but I realized that Ubuntus LTS isn't really LTS unless you use Unity. Linux is about choice. I'm back on Debian after 20 years, and life is good.

Why just TikTok? Because it's nominally a wing of the MSS (Ministry of State Security), and thus used to target individual Americans with propaganda designed to weaken democracy.

I agree that social media should be regulated into strict privacy, which would break their business model.

Nonetheless, there's a world of difference between selling marketing data to advertisers, and a hostile foreign actor using such data in an attempt to tear the nation apart.

In Queer Theory, an explicit goal is to breakdown childhood innocence. Some of the progenitors of this stuff -- Judith Butler, Michael Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir -- really did advocate for "cross generational sex", more commonly known as pedophilic rape. Queer Theory, at heart, is deeply and intentionally illiberal, and as such, takes advantage of liberal society to push its own brand of authoritarianism. They see other people's kids as theirs to manipulate. For the greater good, of course.

These activists are pushing sexualized material into schools, as part of their "moral" project.

Removing activist books from the library is the least we can do.

"AI Ethics" is a misnomer. I has nothing to do with either AI, or ethics, unless you believe woke is moral.

Even if the Russian administration is determined to go out with a nuclear tantrum, I doubt I'd trust the design and maintenance of their systems, compared to that of America, France, and UK. It'd be a tragedy if only 1 works, of course.

This comment stems from a misunderstanding of what our economic system actually is. People have the freedom to make the best arrangements that suite them. Back in the 1600s, that was mainly subsistence farming.

And this is wrong simply on the face of it. Joe Pleb wouldn't use these services unless they were a value add to him personally. So the benefits necessarily accrue to more than the top 1%.

Switched from Ubuntu to Debian a few months ago. Sure it helps that I'm not a Linux n00b, but I'm never looking back.

Politics, in general, used to be far more extreme. On the right, we had wingnuts like David Duke and Pat Robertson

For the left, well the list if far more dire. There were literally 1000s of left wing terrorist attacks in the hippy-60s, for example, The Weather Underground. 100+ million dead at the hands of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Yes they aren't American, but there figures were revered by hugely influential lefties like Howard Zinn, Herbert Marcuse, and Angela Davis long after the body count and utter inhumanity of communist regimes was well established.

And if you go back further in time... there was physical violence in Congress in the 1850s. The French Revolution, the rise of the KKK, Woodrow Wilson's "fascist" moment...

Further back, you have near constant religious warfare: millions slaughtered, whose pointless deaths inspired Hobb's Leviathan, and the birth liberalism as a political theory.

Making sh*t up as a political cudgel for the narrative present isn't teaching "the ugly bits of slavery". "Historians" like Howard Zinn and NHJ read 1984 as a howto manual.

The tax payer was always in charge of the curriculum. Teachers are hired to teach the curriculum set out by the state.

You're so far behind on this. The point of "Critical Theory" is to be relentlessly critical to destabilize social norms. And, as Marcuse advocated in Repressive Tolerance, to be as absolutely biased as possible in exercising naked group-on-group social power. Everything from your side is completely forgiven, and obsesses of minor transgressions, perceived or imaginary, of anyone who stands in your way.

Saying this is "a stop too far" is like saying that you disagree with violence in warfare. Yes, it sucks. There's no good faith conversation to be had about it with true believers.

The CCP has absolutely no intention of allowing anything remotely like power sharing, or peaceful regime change. There's no actual civilian/military divide. There's not real government/business divide. Everything is at the behest of the CCP, which has wound itself into every institution, every school, every textbook. They are hell bent on dominating the world because they're the best, and it hurts their feels that we don't acknowledge it. They are also obscenely corrupt and brutal kleptocrats, willing to kill people and sell their organs, or commit cultural+racial genocide against entire sub-populations.

As in Russia, regime change may well mean a brutal death, like that of Gaddafi or Ceauescu.

Indeed, Xi and Putin want to make the world safe for dictators like them. What happened to the Soviet Union terrifies the CCP for good reason.

The irony is, that China depends on the USA far more than the converse. Almost all their food an energy is imported through a world trade system that is patrolled by the US Navy. If the US stayed home, and say India decided to disrupt those oil tankers sailing just past it... then China would starve and deindustrialize within a year.

China's only hope for world dominance comes through a pusillanimous Western coalition that isn't prepared to stand up for liberal values. That was the great hope for the CCPs plans for Taiwan. That was Putin's hope in Ukraine.

If the West doesn't back Ukraine and punish Russia, then there will be many many more wars in the near future. I don't know why China and Russia think they should be allowed all the benefits of the Western system without playing ball. They could always shut their doors and stay home.