You're deaf aren't you. What you're pointing out is peanuts (in practice, and ov...

dghlsakjg · 2024-11-07T18:23:48 1731003828

I'm not deaf, but please don't use a disability as a slur for ignorance.

I'm not defending what the US has done, but compromising elected officials in the House of Parliament is not 'peanuts' by any measure, and it is something that China has done, and the US hasn't.

I also have never said that what the US is doing is acceptable.

If Google opened offices that were a CIA front posing a national security risk, I would expect them to be shown the door as well. From what I understand, the reason Bytedance had their offices shut down was because they were acting as a front for the CCP.

yoavm · 2024-11-07T08:05:44 1730966744

Peanuts become a real problem when the country throwing them is a totalitarian dictatorship, and spying becomes tolerable when the country doing it is a democracy.

How many people are forgetting those basics will never cease to surprise me.

x3ro · 2024-11-07T12:36:08 1730982968

First of all, when intelligence services are concerned, it doesn't seem like it matters much whether it's a democracy or not, since everything is done in secret. So voters (even in a two-party system) couldn't really make informed voting decisions on anything related, unless of course whistleblowers inform us about the secretive stuff. But even then, not much seems to differ between a republican and a democract president / government.

So, effectively, it seems like US voters have the same amount of influence on their intelligence services' spying, both domestic and international, than citizens of China do.

Long story short, "spying becomes tolerable when the country doing it is a democracy" is definitely not something I agree with, at least not in the democractic setups we see in the west (and that includes Europe, to be clear).