THE PSYCHOLOGIST : TikTok bans

TikTok bans

A gross invasion of free speech. Even banning it on government devices is dubious and and a wider ban would undoubtedly fall foul of SCOTUS. The fact that is is Chinese-owned seems to be the problem for legislators. Sounds racist to me. Racism and paranoia generally go together. For once, AOC speaks sense

TikTok can't seem to catch a break. For years, the app has operated under the distant threat of a nationwide ban or forced sale. Now, mounting security and privacy concerns are prompting lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to debate its future.

Last week, the short-form video platform with 150 million active users in the U.S. made headlines amid a highly publicized congressional hearing that brought TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew face to face with some of his toughest critics. Five palpably tense hours of questioning illuminated very little about what, if anything, Chew can do to quell lawmakers' fears. Earlier this month, the Biden administration reportedly delivered an ultimatum to the app's Chinese parent company, ByteDance: Sell their shares in TikTok to an American company or accept the ban as punishment. Multiple pieces of legislation empowering Biden to enact such a ban have been introduced.

The implication, of course, is that Chinese ownership poses an existential threat to American democracy by putting our personal data and our recommendations algorithms within the Chinese government's grasp. ByteDance has been credibly accused of surveilling at least two American journalists last year. But having an American tech company handle your data doesn't inherently make it safer. Facebook brought one of the biggest tech scandals of the 2010s stateside by allowing a British political consulting firm to intercede in the 2016 presidential election.

TikTok is in the regulatory hot seat right now. The app is already banned from all government-issued devices, as well as state-owned devices in more than half of the country. Several universities have gone so far as to block TikTok from campus Wifi networks and a host of other countries are enforcing partial or total bans of their own.

But the platform has the tide of public favor to buoy it. As Congress grilled and interrupted Chew throughout his testimony, the internet mocked lawmakers for being out of touch. Tweets confessing to feeling thirsty for the embattled CEO went viral. Dozens of creators gathered on Capitol Hill in a show of support for the platform. And Janette Ok, the lifestyle influencer behind @inmyseams, was among them.

“Each of these platforms have magic to them," Ok tells Glamour. "And the magic of TikTok is the ability to create community and to feel seen and heard by those that you don't even know. More than any other social media platform, TikTok gives the user the opportunity to become the creator. No other app allows the creator to film a video, chop it up, add music, make transitions, but do all that stuff within the single app. That revolutionized social media as a whole landscape.”

That doesn't mean TikTok is irreplaceable, Ok says. At the end of the day, she's not a TikTok creator—she's a content creator. But TikTok, with its built-in editing software and extensive audio library, had a special way of convincing regular people to experiment with and participate in creator culture.

“What we're going to lose is the opportunity to be curious," Ok says. "When I started on TikTok, I felt like I was following a formula for my Instagram feed. I was literally planning my grid. I was planning a neutral aesthetic. I was using the same filters. I was really trying to gain a following by copying somebody else's aesthetics. On TikTok, it really challenged me to figure out what it meant to be myself.”

V Spehar, the TikTok creator behind “Under the Desk News,” says that after attending the hearing they feel “more confident now than ever that a ban is not on the table.” But the bill Biden is “very in favor” of passing—also known as the Restrict Act—could set a dangerous precedent for government overreach and censorship. (Which are, ironically, the very threats to national security lawmakers hope to mitigate with this measure.)

“Congress is trying to use fear of a potential for an adversary to convince the American public to hand over a huge amount of control of all of their privacy to the government,” Spehar says. “They're going to give themselves the power to ban any technology or any potential threat that they deem vaguely unsafe…They're using this TikTok ban and xenophobia as a Trojan horse to get this bill across the line here, which just gives them incredible power. They don't care about TikTok because they don't understand it.”

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is one of a scant number lawmakers who have chosen to support TikTok. In a post, the progressive Democrat warned against taking drastic measures before without evidence that they're necessary. Members of Congress, she says, have not been briefed on any national security threats stemming from the platform.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/how-the-tiktok-ban-is-forcing-creators-to-pivot-or-not/ar-AA19q9Cg

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http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

TikTok bans

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