https://responsiblestatecraft.org/china-cold-war-2669160202/
Nice to see your hard earned tax dollars are going towards such a fabulous cause. Meanwhile I've heard it said that Chinese and Russian bots exploit divisions in the Western world by talking about things like poverty, homelessness, gun violence, racism and sexism. Well maybe you should start doing something about those issues to stop them being used as fuel for alleged foreign propaganda efforts hmmm?
"Lets show those dastardly Chinese why we don't have healthcare. Also the rest of the world that not having healthcare is better than having infrastructure!"
what else were they meant to spend it on, improving their country's economy?
Man they could have sent that 1.6 billion to Israel for more bombs, I obviously want my tax money to be spent on weapons to kill children /s
This fits nicely with that article about how child poverty has tripled since 2021 - since they dropped the child tax credits (or whatever they were calling the paymemts)
On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy's employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That's usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they're effective, regardless of whether they're fair for the other side, because you can't really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.
Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries' grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies' destruction. Chemical weapons were "banned" because they were of little value to the major powers' military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.
On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you're simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they'd hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?
So yes, I'd prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy's propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent's situation worse doesn't help your people. Even if it might "defeat" the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.
The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don't care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them...
(I don't think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)
I don't think China wants to be the enemy of the US. They are the largest trading partner of the US. They seem genuinely interested in cooperating and bettering their own society. USians seem to be the ones bent on enmity. The US apparently thinks building infrastructure and developing the economies of other nations is 'malign influence.' The US killed citizens of allied nations through propaganda to ensure they wouldn't become friendlier with China, who was offering them vaccines while the US and Europe were hoarding their own.
The US sees 'being a large country and having influence' as threatening, there's no way to peacefully coexist with a country that sees everyone else as a threat by default.
what if we just stopped having a cold war
That would be perfect, yes
USA cannot and will not compete with China in terms of fairer deals and more humane investments and loans. But progranda is something the USA excells at.
Not even in an 100 years can China develop a progranda network like the United States. Maybe in 300, in reference to Liu Xiaobo, the most principled(Not CIA backed) of the racist American dog Chinese libs borne from the Deng era promotion of Western thoughts.
Overall, this is outwardly the smartest play the USA can do to compete with China. Just lie, lol.
Cheaper than hot war
false dichotomy
Why would we let only our adversaries perspective be broadcast? Also bots, misinformation and specifically targeting wedge issues to drive a division in our country is not beneficial to our society.
Well we could devote those resources to solving the problems they are criticizing maybe. It would improve the lives of USians and undercut the arguments being brought up.
Spending billions to tell other countries that more infrastructure is actually bad is probably counterproductive and wasteful. Like how we spent money to kill Filipino people by telling them to avoid the Chinese produced covid jab.
Why would the leopard restrict its own diet of faces?
What's driving divisions in your shithole country is the fact that capitalist system of relations has driven the working majority to the brink. That's what's leading people to lose faith in the system and become discontent. The notion that it's nefarious foreign actors that are ruining the shining city on the hill is imbecilic beyond belief. Propaganda has always existed, the question is why people are receptive to it today when they weren't before.
"they weren't before"
source?
Go look at the history of politics in the US, it's pretty clear that societal cohesion was far higher prior to 2008 crash.
yeah but you said "propaganda" not "societal cohesion". I'm sure the Red Scare is pretty much entirely due to propaganda.
societal cohesion is unraveling, i think, because the internet has expanded the influence of manipulators over vulnerable individuals. As more people fall for these manipulative tactics, it boosts the credibility of absurd claims simply because they gain popularity.
Lack of social cohesion is what makes people open to all sorts of ideas outside the mainstream, including propaganda. Social cohesion isn't unravelling because of the internet, it's unravelling because people's standard of living is collapsing and they don't believe that the government is working in their interest. Internet has been around for a long time now, but the political polarization is a very recent phenomenon that perfectly coincides with the ongoing financial crisis that started in 2008.
Your points definitely have merit but I still think that a large portion of it is due to every single thing we see on the internet is divisive and a call to arms.
Reminder that the little island weve inhabited here avoids so much of the mainstream bullshit and ragebaiting algos. Mainstream non-cuated feeds are so bad.
Either way our points go hand-in-hand.
Thing is that the internet is a global phenomenon, and we don't see the same thing happening in all the countries. So, the internet itself clearly cannot be the explanation here. There are specific issues present in the US society that we see manifesting as political polarization. I do agree with you that the internet makes it easier for ideas to spread, and thus it acts as an accelerant. However, there need to be underlying divisions to accelerate in the first place.
Because maybe it is enough to speak the truth instead of anti propaganda. That being said it is not clear how the money is spent exactly.
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