The notion that it’s no different from China is absurdist propaganda. In China there is no such thing as abuse of power if it is sanctioned by the party.
I was responding to the notion that it is completely different from China. It is not. The western nations are more totalitarian than they would like to admit.
Western governments are not controlled by a single party with an lifetime ruler and no democratic mechanisms at all for expressing dissent, let alone moderating power.
It’s not a matter of degree. Doing bad stuff is not the same as totalitarianism.
What kind of false equivalency bullshit is this? In China, you utter the words "national security" and newspapers get shut down by the police: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-beijing-shu.... Publish the wrong kind of books and they'll kidnap you and put you in prison (even if you have a foreign citizenship, which you'll conveniently "voluntarily renounce" in custody): https://www.npr.org/2020/02/25/809163417/hong-kong-bookselle....
I'm tired of this whatboutism used to excuse completely appalling behavior with -zero- checks and balances at all. Country A doing bad thing doesn't excuse Country B from doing a much worse thing.
I don't know why you think I would excuse the USA's actions, both now and in the past. "Many people want to live in X" is not a strong argument- many people want to live in the US as well... now we've gotten nowhere.
My point above is not that the US is above reproach, but that it isn't disapppearing its citizens for criticizing the government or practicing different religions or being of a specific ethnicity. Etc. To say the two countries are "equally bad" is a pro-ccp propaganda point.
The US has killed their own citizen with drones, has imprisoned people who revealed government abuse and just last year arrested more than 100 journalists.
https://cpj.org/reports/2020/12/record-number-journalists-ja...
So I could easily same the same about you, you are repeating a pro-CIA propaganda point. I would suggest to ask around in Latin-America, in Africa in China and even in Europe and ask people who they consider more a threat to world peace and which behaves in an arrogant, "my way or the highway", imperialistic manner. You will be very surprised and the whole worldview you were taught in your perfectly designed educational system will come crash down.
Less swearing allegiance to the flag and more travelling. I hope that is not ad-hominem enough to try to ban me.
I don't know what -would- be a good metric, but perhaps the expatriation rate, immigration rate to other countries, and brain drain rate would be good places to start.
If you want to have a civilized conversation, the first thing is to stop assuming everyone only consumes propagandistic drivel if you disagree with them. Many people, like myself, have traveled and lived in various other countries. Nowhere in my comments have I ever said the US doesn't have issues; in fact I quite frequently discuss the enormous issues the US has and so do most of the people that I know...
This is a freedom that I, and the media, do have and can exercise without getting imprisoned. The reporter issue -is- quite serious and needs addressing, but is related to police abusing their power during the riots last year, not the federal or state government going to people's homes and arresting them for posting online criticism of the government or ruling party. We're free to message each other and post online about every single atrocity the US government has committed without repercussion. How can a bad situation be improved if criticizing the government is impossible?
> No one wants to live in a racist country when they will be treated as second-class citizens at best.
You mean like living in any homogeneous Asian country as any ethnicity except the primary one? You accuse me of not traveling, but my experience from living in S. Korea and Japan showed me that highly homogeneous countries can be wildly racist about everyone. The US is not the only country has serious racism issues, and it's a shame that I need to state that. It seems like you think the US is one entity, but depending on the city and state it can be extremely multicultural and diverse (like Chicago, my home town).
Plenty of people are moving to the US still; I don't really find it a useful metric for an argument either way because it doesn't consider the origin country or the immigrant's prior situation.
While I would still prefer to live in the US, you would find by talking to Chinese citizens that they feel exactly the same way about their country. The same applies to Russians and other large nations. We are all being fed propaganda, it doesn’t matter what country you live in.
You can protest the government. You can talk shit about the leaders. You aren't jailed or killed for any of these things in the US. And 'as recently as 1970s' is half a century ago.
I'm European btw.
While they might not be going full Maoist China on it's dissedents, they exercise more subtle methods to control the narrative and compromising movements as well as outright assassinations of prominent figures.
This is absolutely not unique to the US of course and this goes on in Europe as well. They're just among the most irritatingly self rightous about their imaginary respect for dissent.
The powers that be always want to continue being. But methods matter. How many politicians in the US or Europe have been poisoned by the state in the last decade? Don't you think there are politicians that the government would rather didn't exist? Yet they don't kill them or fabricate charges.
It is ridiculous to compare liberal democracies with autocratic regimes.
But it is true that we really need to keep our guard up to retain our liberal democracies, they are being attacked form within as well as outside.
While I cannot disconfirm the former (though there have certainly been some high profile cases with fishy circumstances- such as JFK), what about the Russiagate nonsense with Trump? I might hate him but the manchurian candidate theory was transparently bs from the very beginning, even before the investigation that proved it. He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last. It seems to be a bipartisan thing to simultaneously shift focus of the public from national level corruption in favour of a foreign bogeyman and simultaneously slander opponents.
In a so called representative democracy, you do not need to outright murder or imprison your opponents to enforce control, you simply either have to relegate them to irrelevance through skewed or absent corporate media coverage or buy them out. See Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, early Nancy Peloski, AOC, etc.
The tactics might differ from a transparently autocratic regime but the intentions are the same, and the end result is not really as different as liberals like to paint it. For all the unpopular politicians that are allowed to continue, there is police violence, surveillance, torture, imprisonment, and outright assasinations of prominent figures in activist groups. Then there is what they get up to outside the confines of US citizenship and borders.
Look at the state of Bolivia, Columbia, most of Central and Southern America actually. They have death squads from paramilitary groups backed by US multinational companies for the sole purpose of brutally putting down any attempts at collective bargaining or real democracy. Just because it's not visible in your backyard doesn't mean your country is not responsible for that mess.
The collusion allegations were not a Manchurian candidate theory and were never disproven by any investigation. (To the contrary, prior to being pardoned by Trump, several people either plead guilty or were convicted at trial for lies to investigators the key substance of which was falsely denying active actual ot attempted coordination with Russian state actors by Trump campaign officials.) The story that Trump was somehow exonerated is itself a propaganda story from the Trump camp that waa deliberately facilitated by AG Barr’s deliberate distortion of the Mueller investigation findings.
> He's certainly not the first politican that this line was used on and will probably not be the last.
He's definitely not the first politician to actively seek foreign assistance against domestic political opposition, nor the first to be sloppy enough that it gets noticed in time for it to be used against him (see, e.g., Louis XVI of France.)
Mueller specifically did not make a statement on it because he determined it to be Congress’ job and especially because he did not want to put up an appearance of political prosecution.
He left it to Republicans in Congress to do the right thing but they failed to do so.
This is the fallback excuse Democrats always play when they either don't really want to implement something (such as a $15 minimum wage) or they know they don't really have a leg to stand on - blame the Republicans. Same excuse made by Obama and the same excuse now being made by Biden.
When you have decades of experience dealing with a political opponent that has proven time and time again to be acting in bad faith, defering to their sense of decorem and morality is being complicit in their actions in my eyes.
And no, it did not exonerate Trump. He's obviously corrupt to the bone but the specific angle was significant Russian interference and Mueller completely failed to substantiate it. It's also worth noting that despite the media making a big song and dance around Trump meetings with Putin, the actual policies during his administration were significantly more adversarial towards Russian economic interests than Biden's administration has been so far.
So, you're telling me the victims are still alive? 50 years is not a long time
Someone has some reading to do.......
Don't hurt yourself moving those goalposts.
The United States and China are nothing alike. Try flying a Winnie the Pooh blimp (makes fun of China’s leader) in China and see how long before that gets shut down. We can also freely talk about what is going on in China/HK/TW/wugiwers here, where such speech would be prohibited in China.
There were accusations of forced sterilization at the Mexican border: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-54265571
> disappearing political dissidents
cough Julian Assange, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning
Yes, it's not "disappearing" as in "getting them killed", but nevertheless their treatment has been horrifying.
> creating debt traps for the developing world
The US has putsched against a lot of Southern American countries and keeps supplying their narco gangs with money and weaponry. That is just as bad as the Chinese debt trapping.
> The United States launches inquiries into civilian casualties
Lots of police violence goes unpunished. Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio and soldiers convicted of war crimes.
> enforces regulations generally aimed towards the public good
Hard disagree. The amount of regulations torn down during the Trump term is massive.
> enforces rule of law
For those who can afford it, see my point about police violence above.
> has free democratic elections
The US is still considered a "flawed democracy" (https://thehill.com/homenews/news/537204-us-score-falls-in-e...), partially due to systematic voter discrimination (gerrymandering, voting access requirements).
> If you would rather live in the orbit of any single other superpower or empire in world history, you're deluded.
Come to the European Union. I admit it, we are not perfect either (particularly on handling the refugee situation and member countries drifting towards authoritarianism and dictatorship), but generally we are a better society in a number of metrics.
They haven’t been disappeared.
Yet somehow Epstein and Harvey Weinstein run rampant among our own soil, all with open secrets. Literally decades of abuse before authorities finally arrest them, and only because regular people came out and protested after they heard of the stories publicly. Like the gov had no idea ever... for decades on open secrets like that... until now?
The effort put into these scenarios are very skewed.
Yet somehow Epstein and Harvey Weinstein run rampant among our own soil, all with open secrets.
Do you expect the police to just magically know that people are committing crime? The criminal investigation process usually begins with a police report (of someone reporting a crime). In the absence of a police report (as with the Epstein and Weinstein cases) the police have "no cause" to investigate absent some other mechanism that publicly reveals alleged crimes (like a news report). And on that note, in both of the cases you cited, prosecutors did try to investigate the rumors, but couldn't find anyone wiling to testify against those men until the scale of their crimes became public.
Epstein was arrested and awaiting trial once his crimes became publicly known, and before he committed suicide was expected to face charges in multiple states and countries. Epstein became so toxic that multiple men known to have gone to Epstein's parties have faced social and financial repercussions for it. Melinda Gates famously divorced Bill because of his friendship with Epstein. Similarly, Weinstein was also arrested once his crimes became public and is facing charges in multiple states, was kicked out of every industry group, and essentially banished from his former life.
Nitpick, but wasn't that only true of Manning? Assange irresponsibly put Manning's cables out in unredacted form, which I believe revealed the names of sources who were put in danger. IIRC, Snowden only leaked to Greenwald and a few mainstream newspapers who were careful to make redactions on what they released to avoid such outcomes.
That's partially a product of the US justice system, which is among the more rigorous in the world, and tends to favor letting the guilty go free over punishing the innocent. This is a trade-off, not an objectively bad thing.
Now, I would attribute the rest of those scenarios to plain-old corruption - which is a problem for every system of government without checks and balances (that are actually used).
What are you talking about? Epstein died in jail, and Weinstein is currently in prison.
Read up on that story. It was malpractice by one outside doctor that served one detention center, it was not government policy.
https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/health-and-society/dark-histo...
Shameless.
instead they just bomb them to smithereens
>taking over city states
you gotta think on the scale of countries with puppet governments
>disappearing political dissidents
south american leaders would disagree
>creating debt traps for the developing world
what is IMF?
>shutting down newspapers
NSA was just caught spying on Tucker Carlson
>United States launches inquiries into civilian casualties
We investigated out selves and found out nothing wrong, and if you try to arrest our soldiers we'll bomb your country
>enforces regulations generally aimed towards the public good
regulations paid for by lobbyists on behalf of billionaire donors
> enforces rule of law
every country enforces rule of law
> has free democratic elections
press x to doubt
> and generally upholds the rights and freedoms outlined in its constitution
what is Patriot ACT?
I'm an American and I love my country, despite its flaws, but you are either a paid shill at Langley or brainwashed beyond disbelief
Did you miss the unconstitutional lockdowns for the "Boston Bomber"?
And...many other "emergencies", as decided by a single US politician?
https://nation.time.com/2013/04/19/was-boston-actually-on-lo...
And probably soon "public health"
What a laughable notion. Utter the words "national security" and all your checks and balances go right out the window. There are also no checks and balances for non-US citizens: it is free to violate my non-existent rights as much as it wants.