this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Tencent, a Chinese company is a major owner of Epic. Westerners simply hate Chinese owned tech due to political reasons. Huawei and especially TikTok are other examples.
Yes, purely political reasons, there is no other reason to be wary of proprietary chinese software.
Of course there are other concerns but politics is the main one. There's little reason to think for example Samsung, Instagram or even Steam are any more safer than the previously mentioned Chinese owned alternatives. They all collect, store and sell every bit of data they possibly can benefit from.
Your examples are a bit odd, people constantly bitch about everything Samsung and Meta do, to the degree that even tech philistines are aware of it. Tencent is, in most of the ways that matter, just a branch of the Chinese government and a severe privacy violator in more tangible ways than ad space profitability improvements. Steam rarely jails people, Chinese companies phoning home helps do just that.
China is going to put me, an American in America, in jail using a game launcher?
Do you intend to visit china after disparaging it?
hmm, I guess it depends on your definition of disparage, but the thing is that even if I was out here in America hawking the most shameless bullshit, China wouldn't do shit when I visited short of question me a bit harder in customs because arresting me for pretty benign actions I took in another country as someone with no affiliation with China would typically be considered kidnapping under international law. Of course, America calls most instances of its enemies arresting its citizens kidnapping, but China rarely arrests Americans (including when tourism to China was higher) or foreign citizens in general.
Reddit geopolitics work a lot better when they stick to vague insinuations and cartoonish hyperbole, because when you drill down and try to set realistic expectations based on the information available, it falls apart completely.
Because I instantly pegged you as a tanky, I’m going to be brief. You don’t intend to disparage china but do intend to go there so I sincerely wish you a fun trip! China’s great, if you know where to go and what to do. I also hope you don’t win the lottery and end up a geopolitical token during a disagreement between states, as happened a few years ago to some Australians and Canadians abroad. Avoid patriating and you’re just about as safe as you believe.
I have criticized China, you can dig around on my Hexbear account if you really like and find that (@GarbageShoot)*, but China isn't nearly as afraid of criticism as the "literally 1984" redditors say, it just has a practical sensitivity over issues of sovereignty that they fail to understand as part of a coherent ideology other than hyper-defensiveness (go figure, Redditors are politically illiterate).
China is a very diverse place with a wide spectrum of ideology -- most of which I disagree with, going by rough estimations based on recent statements from their central committee. Speaking in terms of meaningful factions that have sway above the municipal level, I'd say they are much more diverse than the US in this respect, since the US is characterized more by the harshness of disagreement than the actual extremity of differences in overall policy. If we imagine Chinese politics on a spectrum from "Maoism" to "some hodgepodge of reactionary antiquarianism and desire to be a western vassal again, plus religious zealotry**" where the former is a 1 and the latter is a 10, our friend Xi seems to be at maybe a 4, I'm at about 3. I'm not a full-on ultra but I think there's some right-deviation going on (not as much as in past decades, admittedly). Are you following?
It feels a little unfair to dismiss me as a "tanky," I don't think I called you names, but at least you aren't being too mean beyond that. What do you mean "patriate"? That's something that countries do, as far as I can tell.
*I am completely confident that you won't actually find the remarks I'm talking about, but I think you'll trust me that they are there.
**This last part is mainly among rightist minority groups rather than the Han Chinese rightists, who mainly stick to the first two categories.
You’ve led me to learn that patriate, expatriate, and repatriate have unrelated definitions and I’ve been guilty of using malapropisms. Past that, I apologize but I really don’t intend to engage in lengthy political arguments or dissertations on the internet anymore. And it’s best not to link your other accounts, you will be doxxed by someone. Best to edit that out.
I've been writing under the assumption that the accounts that I gave the same name to would be connected (like a proto-federation thing), so don't worry about that. I appreciate the concern, though.
Mass surveillance and flagrant human rights violations are now """"political reasons."""" In other news, nothing happened at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
Lots of things happened in the square at that time, as the Chinese government discussed on TV the following days. One thing that did not happen was people dying, though some were struck with batons to force them to disperse after they declined to follow the demand to disperse (most left peacefully).
Oh, those must have been massage tanks.
Redditors will believe anything that supports "China bad," even silly lies that were debunked decades ago. Here are some different testimonies from student leaders of the protests. You tell me what seems credible.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Vu3zmbFGwQA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I hate Tiktok because it's spyware. Show me the source code to prove me wrong.
I hate Epic because they abandoned the Unreal and Unreal Tournament series, delisted from any store(including single player games) and turned off the Master Server preventing official multiplayer.
I hate AAA game developers because of what the MBAs did to milk every cent of out of their customers.
Y’know, back in the day, we’d have friends that were Muslim or gay, that would have bullies around at school trying to beat them up. We’d call the bullies assholes, break their legs, and tell them to change their stance or have their arms broken next.
Now, because those bullies happen to wear a suit and make speeches on government TV, and also want to ship our gay and Muslim friends off to prisons, hating them is considered “political”. Or, they highlight their own race and say we’re being “xenophobic”. Or, they simply lie and say that there is no genocide going on.
Man, can’t we just go back to breaking legs when assholes become religiously intolerant?
Even state department mouthpieces have walked back the lie of there being a genocide in Xinjiang. Leave it to Redditors to be to the right of the state department.