Oh No Marg! There are a few things we should be extremely concerned about.
China is at war with the United State right now!
This is one thing we cannot be apathetic about!
Remember this! In three years, you will say, "Well, i'll be damned! She was right!"
There's not a damned thing anyone on this board or anyone who 'represents' us can do about it. Our system is a bloated, gangrenous mess and China's isn't because they amputate the festering bits while Bill Gates smiles and says 万事如意Wà nshì rúyì to the CCP and tells us the scary tiger is just a little kitten. They're wrong, but so are we. Since they're more ruthlessly wrong and now have the tech to back it , we're toast. It's not just Big Techs'
backdoor deals with totalitarianism that are the problem. Western companies have cut shady deals with freedom hating regimes in many other sectors, but tech is the issue because possessing it makes controlling people so very easy.
Article below is pre-2016 ....not as a political marker, but as a sociological one in regards to conspiracy theory accusations. Since it's an old article (The Guardian) from 2010, I'm copying and pasting more than I usually do.
Web Censorship in China? Not a problem, says Bill Gates
After pouring billions of dollars into the global fight against malaria and rebranding Microsoft in a more cuddly, human way,
Bill Gates had just about shaken off accusations that he represented all that was unappealing about aggressive American capitalism.
But today his reinvention suffered something of a setback when he played down China's attempts to stifle dissent on the internet as "very limited".
Less than two weeks after
Google said it planned to uncensor its Chinese search engine in protest at attempts to break into the email accounts of human rights activists, Gates criticised his rival's decision and insisted that agreeing to Beijing's demands was just part of doing business in the country. "You've got to decide: do you want to obey the laws of the countries you're in or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there," he told ABC's Good Morning America programme.
He also brushed aside accusations that
Microsoft has been complicit in helping filter the web by saying that it was not an issue because any censorship could be circumvented with technical knowledge. "Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited," he said. "It's easy to go around it, so I think keeping the internet thriving there is very important."
...
The comments ... come despite the fact that efforts to censor the internet in China – a project known as the Golden Shield – are among the most extensive in the world. The country's estimated 300 million internet users are almost all affected by the various blocks and filters, which include direct censorship of anti-government protesters, members of the Falun Gong religious group, Tibetan independence campaigners and the Taiwanese media. At various points, Beijing has also blocked access to international news websites including the BBC and the Guardian, and around 50 Chinese bloggers are in prison as a result of their postings.
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