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The realpolitik answer is that they’re the only country in the region with highly functioning western-style market economy. That is valuable to other functioning western style market economies. Its a system trying to help itself propagate.

They need the moneys to genocide harder, better, faster, stronger.

And fuck the house.

I agree on keeping bills separate, but you seem to be confused. Tiktok wasn't in the same bill, the help for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel was bundled together.

The reason for it was that the current speaker actually wanted help for Israel and Taiwan but was holding the bill because of Ukraine, which his orange friend doesn't support.

This is why it was held. Why the speaker had a sudden change of heart?

It was because two Republicans threatened to resign, leaving Democrats in majority and getting speakership (I wish that outcome would actually happened).

So he brought those bills to vote, but he split the bills. Because of it, now they have to go back to Senate, adding another unnecessary delay.

You've got many good points, and I'm not defending the Tiktok ban (or whatever technical thing it is), but counterpoint your last one:

Look what Facebook did to the boomers. Do we want to go through that again but with Millennials and Tiktok? Our generation has more experience with social media, granted. Still, that's part joke and part something I think about as an older, non-Tiktok millennial.

While I agree with you in general, this is not what happened in this case.

The House voted on the four bills in succession, one day after a rare and extraordinary bipartisan coalition teed up the votes, with more Democrats (165) than Republicans (151) voting for the “rule” to proceed to the measures.

There was roughly speaking the Ukraine bill, the Israel bill, the Taiwan and other aid bill, and the tik tok bill. All separately passed. Ukraine funding was not on the same bill passed as the TikTok thing today.

Combining issues in bills isn't always bad and can be a vehicle toward compromise too. Separating things can even be a way of killing a bill. There are pros and cons, really depends on the situation.

While I do agree on including “unrelated” things together, these all sound like they are separate bills in this case.

Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan are all separate bills for “foreign aid”. The article isn’t 100% clear, but TikTok sounds like there is some separation. The reason I think they’re separate is that the article mentioned that they voted on each item, meaning that there’s at least 3-4 different votes.

It’s all the game of politics. “Shake my hand and I’ll shake yours” stuff, and Johnson, regardless of his overall beliefs, seems like he’s well-versed in the game.

If banning TikTok, as inane as that is, ensures we continue to aid Ukraine, then fine, ban it. eye roll

Israel, however, is the matter of getting enough of Rs to vote Yea to outweigh the Maggots. I don’t like it, but the feds spend billions of dollars on tons of stuff I dislike. If allowing a continued genocide in one country means that the same won’t happen in two others…(sigh)

TikTok is cancer regardless of who owns it.

Nah. I don't think Bytedance sells. The big enchilada is the source code and that's not getting sold because there's 6 Billion more people they can get on the app.

There are several right-wing groups eager to buy it, which is 100% why they're going after it.

Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook. They're going to control all of it soon.

Din they'll be requiring expensive identity verification for online accounts to make the fediverse financially unsustainable.

The US government spends more per capita in healthcare than any country with universal healthcare and then a big chunk of the population also pays for private health insurance over that.

It's not about not being able to afford it, it would even be cheaper.