[mindslight]

> Folks care because their bottom line is impacted in a time when it’s already hard to make ends meet every month due to rising costs of food, gas, and utilities, not because of some unnamed boogeyman in the form of a “nation state competitor”

While agreeing with where you're coming from, including this, it is also worth nothing that there is truth to what you're rejecting as well. Our longstanding unsolved domestic problems are fertile ground for nation state competitors to foment discontent, gain oppositional mindshare, and ultimately harm our overall position. The elites seem to think these problems can just be ignored or swept under the rug, when in reality the frustration grows until it boils over into highly destructive self-owns. We're already seeing this actively play out on a grand scale with general politics, but it can certainly happen in more specific ways that target things like data centers.

To be industrially competitive we need to fix our longstanding domestic problems that fall on individuals, rather than merely ignoring them. In the case of data centers - lack of effective environmental regulations around air and sound pollution, complete inability for municipalities to regulate the operations of something after it's been built, and a shortage of infrastructure that's now been privatized for use by the highest bidder.

Plus that general affordability crisis you touched upon, of course. Nobody likes the feeling that an appendage of a trillion dollar company can come to their city, wave around the promise of everything-bubble money, and make it so their own individual voice is meaningless.

[strictnein]

Exactly. Russia has been doing it for decades and it would be foolish to assume China didn't learn from them. Thomas Rid's "Active Measures" covers this in detail, and it's somewhat maddening to read, because it details how much of the civil strife we've experienced that was exacerbated by their actions.

https://www.amazon.com/Active-Measures-History-Disinformatio...

[izacus]

Blaming Russia (and China) in most cases is a cheap cop out to try to deflect, hide and minimize the actual grievances of people living in USA.

Yes, there's propaganda and most of it doesn't reach the Americans. It's downright insulting to claim their hurts are something that countries on the other side of the world invented.

[strictnein]

> "It's downright insulting to claim their hurts are something that countries on the other side of the world invented."

Not what was being claimed by anyone you're possibly responding to.

Read Active Measures to actually understand what is being discussed here, assuming it's available in your country. The author isn't from the US.

[mindslight]

> It's downright insulting to claim their hurts are something that countries on the other side of the world invented.

This is not what I said at all. Try to hold more one idea in your head at once.

[pibaker]

How is "Anyone who disagrees with me is a Russian troll" working out for you liberals?

[strictnein]

Not what is being claimed here and stating that shows a complete lack of understanding of the term Active Measures, the history of it, and what the book of the same name discusses.

Also, it's amusing you think you know my political leanings or that it would somehow affect the accuracy of what is being discussed. It's strange how people think that they can win arguments by casting the person they're debating into some group they've decided is already wrong.

Anyways, go google the term and then pretend like you knew what it was all along and that you're an expert on Russian influence campaigns of the 20th and 21st centuries. That works well on Twitter and Reddit, maybe it'll work here too?

[mindslight]

Which do you think involves more cognitive dissonance to work through - liberals accepting the country has problems they might be out of touch with, or reactionaries accepting they've sold the country down the river?