Few Americans have considered the rationality of the GFWC without the context of authoritarianism.<p>China blocks the internet because 50 years ago <i>the vast majority of the country was illiterate and subsistence farming.</i> You don't wake up one day equipped to critically think about statements that sound good but aren't true. You don't wake up understanding the tragedy of the commons. You don't suddenly have a historical understanding of how your country came to be and the values it was founded upon. You don't wake up having thought about the golden rule or "equality" and matched that to various situations in the zeitgeist. You don't wake up having fully contemplated that others might treat you the same way you treat them. These things come from major investments in public education.<p>Americans have huge amounts of privilege they aren't even aware they have. We grew up with public education, and don't understand what it means to not have public education, or have a poor literacy rate.<p>It might surprise many to know that while china does have great power over the GFW they choose not to enforce it for many of their educated and more well off citizens, which is why you can use VPN services to get pretty unfiltered internet within China.<p>The US is facing a crisis where half the population doesn't understand that in November they are going to vote to lose the right to have a meaningful vote, and so many people here haven't fully contemplated not taking that very very real possibility seriously. "Hoping" that Americans will arrive at the right conclusion is a poor strategy to continue living in a "liberal democracy." Living in a liberal democracy requires more than hope.<p>We are in the "if you can keep it stage" of "a republic if, you can keep it."<p>Letting a hostile genocidal foreign power have direct access to our countries most vulnerable and impressionable people, our children, is not good policy, <i>especially</i> when that foreign power has gone to great effort to make sure that what they are doing to us, is not done to them.