Following the US Twitterland discussion on TT and Tencent bans again confirms whenever we view events through politics as the primary lens we risk arriving at little else than bigotry.
The world is a complicated place and our tools for understanding it must be sophisticated.

Or at least, sophistication must not be outright rejected unless and until we have tried and tested our tools a lot and are completely comfortable about their robustness and universality.
Now I ask my American friends this question: how well has your tool of viewing everything

via the lens of freedom and democracy worked for you in explaining things which demand solid empirical scrutiny?
Glad to hear your examples where these tools have worked exceedingly well in explaining / predicting how things go.

If I hadn't followed this sector over the years I might be equally gullible to naive heuristics such as "freedom leads to creativity while tyranny encourages copycat". Glad I am not that lazy in mind now.

And the more I follow this sector, the less confident I feel about what I used to believe - TMT is just very disruptive, which is its beauty because we got to learn something new every day. Like Rui said https://twitter.com/ruima/status/1291468665829769216

Or this great thread by Dan who had the privilege to work alongside Zhang Xiaolong - this lucky dude! https://twitter.com/DanGrover/status/1291555490753736705

And sorry I shouldn't sound like describing all my American friends' behavior like that.
Just reading too many weird takes under entirely insightful threads drove me nuts.

And not to discount the importance of political issues but I do feel politics is very complicated, and one needs to master a few areas including economics, history, social sciences etc and follow events closely in order to make informed remarks. It does look like an area anyone

can chip in though. The risk is when we apply simple heuristics to it, it becomes a circular argument that mainly serves to feel good about. Not helpful in gaining insight / advance knowledge.