But people in the US can remove legislatures and the top executive(the President). Do people in China have that option?
It's scary that many actually believe this and thus self-fulfill their prophecy because they don't get involved and don't vote.
To further amplify this detrimental affect, there are state-sponsored trolls/propagandists actively driving this wedge and these narratives online to attack our Democracy from within.
Also, my responses were a reality check in the face of the propaganda you're speaking of. The "the US is the most free and moral country!" folks are getting a much bigger dose of force-fed freedom than anybody else.
I've been involved. Will continue to be. It's still the truth.
Ask yourself, how come when America's chief global rival does bad things, it's cause for condemnation, but America must be protected from criticism?
Nobody cares about Yemen but everyone is very sure Hezbollah are bad guys?
Our system of control is so much more effective than state censorship. And the trains don't even run on time.
How much you want to bet that in 2020, for the umpteenth time in a row, we get a choice between two billion-dollar-funded candidates who are absolutely not going to buck their sponsors, ever? Taste the freedom.
The fact that we have the illusion of choice between candidates who will all do mostly the same things, and won't affect the bureaucracy that much anyways, doesn't make us meaningfully more free.
"But my candidate had a great take on the bathroom bill controversy!", as we continue bombing weddings in afghanistan, imprisoning more people than China (!!!), etc..
I'm not saying China is better, but the fraction of control the average US citizen can exercise over the government in the defined political process is much, much smaller than `1 / 330,000,000`...
> I am unsure about what exactly you are complaining about.
I wasn't. I was refuting common propaganda about the wonders of the United States. How can we fix any of our problems if we don't admit to ourselves that they exist?
With that in mind, on the balance of it, America is overwhelmingly a rule of law jurisdiction, and the PRC is not. There's definitely magnitudes here.
My point is neither side is all good or all bad, and looking at it that way is harmful to the discourse.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/voter-suppress...
https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/worst-voter-suppression-w...
Excuse my french, but what the fuck are you talking about?
How about imprisoning and torturing US citizens without due process in the name of a nebulous war that only gets worse the more we fight it?
What about all the puppet governments we've set up so that our corporate overlords can make a quick buck at the expense of some country who's resources we want to plunder?
The US is an empire. Not based on governmental control, but based on financial control. The difference between surveillance in the US and surveillance in China is that we've managed to keep our surveillance largely in the private sector; but that doesn't mean 1984 doesn't already exist here! In fact, you carry 1984 with you in your pocket everywhere you go!
I'm not saying I'd rather live in China than the US, but putting the US on some high moral pedestal is extremely ignorant of all the terrible things we've done as a country.