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It’s a trip around the world on this week’s Ricochet Podcast. Our guide is AEI’s Nick Eberstadt. He keeps up with all the little details that are often overlooked by prognosticating pundits. How do China’s age distribution and Russia’s health profile for young men hinder their ambitions? Are we in a position to sway India to the West? What other friend prospects are out there? He has answers to all the questions most of us have never thought to ask. And optimism, too!
The guys also talk about the Dutch and their farms and the French and their grèves. Plus, just when you thought we could all agree that TikTok is the worst, our hosts find some finer points to quibble about.
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Ricochet sponsored by Youth Switch
The Ricochet Podcast is sponsored by Ricochet sponsored by Youth Switch.
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Just kidding. I tell you, there are two things I’m specifically listening for here.
The second one is how TikTok Chinese surveillance is A) different from Google/MS/FB US surveillance, and B) different from a regulatory perspective from apps that I like which the government would like to take away (Signal, for instance).
The first one — I’ll withhold comment until.
EDIT: Okay, I have this guy’s book, Men Without Work! Great book, highly recommend. Really liked the interview; good on everybody.
Okay, it wasn;t that kind of demographics conversation, so I’ll pack that away for later. Glad that folks got right on the TikTok vs Google etc thing quickly.
I’ll just list a couple of points:
– Every power we give our government to protect us is swiftly used against us.
– TikTok is a real problem. The more you know about big data and endpoint surveillance, the worse it is.
– TikTok might not be worse than Google. Google is famously anti-American, they hate American power, and they are all over global and particularly American infrastructure, government, endpoints (“your” devices), and commerce. There is nothing else like Google on the planet — never has been.
– I am not aware of another application that is “banned” by the US government, and I don’t like the precedent. At all. There are countries (AUS and NZL among them) where it is flat-out illegal to use an app like Signal because the encryption is effective, and there are no government backdoors.
– Of course TikTok and China are nefarious bad actors. Well grow up, America. Hit rock bottom and wean yourself from the sugar-dopamine.
Somebody, I think Rob, worried that we will discharge the tension about this problem by banning this one app, and then all the energy will be gone. He’s right. After that (says I), the fascist technocratic deep state will have a license to start banning any app it doesn’t like. There will be legislation to once and for all rid our communities of the twin scourges of privacy and security. What do you have to hide, Comrade?
Screw TikTok and screw China. But don’t screw us.
Imagine the good that could be done instead if the government pointed out why TikTok is so bad and explained how TikTok’s surveillance works! Oh, wait a minute.
An East Asian specialist here with a message for Rob Long: Kowtow is Chinese. 叩頭 (lit. hit head [on the floor]. In Mandarin, it’s kòutóu, but in Cantonese it’s closer to the English pronunciation, never mind the tones…In Sino-Japanese, it’s ko:to:, but it’s hardly a household word, though we do sometimes get down on the tatami and bow…
Oh, and then there’s grève, a most interesting word etymologically, even though anyone who’s lived in France will hardly be fond of it. Hint: It’s related to “gravel” and has to do (of course) with l’histoire française.
Nick Eberstadt is an intellect that I do hope Ricochet will have back soon. And wouldn’t it be splendid to have Mary Eberstadt on! She knows so much about what’s wrong with America–and Rob Long is right: It’s not just about TikTok.
James, you can’t leave us hanging; we want to know the problem with semicolons.
Hear that @jameslileks ? A post about semicolons better be in the works…
We can do like Good Morning America, and hype James Lileks’ semicolonoscopy.
Banning Tik Tok will not solve the current social media contagion problem much in the same way that mandating the replacement of fossil fuels on a global scale on a ridiculously short timeline will not meaningfully address climate change. Regarding Tik Tok, there are too many other social media sites for its departure to have a great enough cultural impact, especially since hot sites naturally emerge without much warning. And, on climate change, neither India nor China is proposing climate policies as stringent as ours—because they can’t! The West’s frantic and futile attempts to do the impossible are not just imbecilic, but impoverishing.
I love them. But I’m revising a book and I see too many of them. They were used because I paused for a second to think what came next, and in many cases it should be two sentences.
I do wish the book was something close to marketable, because it’s probably my favorite work ever. Ah well.
I’m taking the bait, James. Why on earth would your latest book not be marketable? BTW, I’m a book editor and love the semicolon but find it is not often used well (at least not by academics in the controversial humanities).
Re at least one type of demographics, I’ll return to the best – or maybe “just” the most important – interview ever, with anyone, on any subjects:
https://www.adrive.com/public/RaM8Mj/NARN%2012-02-06%20NARN%201%20Hour%202%20Mark%20Steyn.mp3