The Chinese government has built up the world’s largest known online disinformation operation and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses—at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found.
The onslaught of attacks – often of a vile and deeply personal nature – is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show.
The US State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world’s information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping. On Wednesday, President Biden is due to meet Xi at a summit in San Francisco.
Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs. They say it’s all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia.
Whether it’s a bug or feature depends on whether you’re trying to hold power or not.
Authoritarianism is often one of the steps on the way to communism, and in theory it makes sense. Once you have unified control, you can start getting everyone and everything to work together.
Problem is, people tend not to do that. If a regular person gets the reins, they are usually unwilling to give them up, and the citizens tend to care more about themselves than the collective
In theory communism works great. In reality it’s the people that fuck it up.
Governmental systems are designed around people, for people. If your governmental system only works if everyone does what they should, your system is broken. Political systems need checks in place to prevent bad actors from screwing the whole thing up.
So if communism doesn’t work with actual people, it’s a worthless system from the start. Maybe some of the ideas can be salvaged. For example, the separation of private and personal property is interesting, and it’s what makes georgism interesting to me, and I think we should be looking at systems like that instead of communism.
The word you’re looking for is “force” and it’s exactly why authoritarianism is a horrible thing. Stop trying to justify it.
Communism doesn’t work because any sufficiently large number of people are going to have disagreements. That’s not a fault of the people, it’s a fault of the system trying to manage them (communism). If your system of government’s only way of manufacturing consensus is violent suppresion, you have a shitty system.