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> Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years. Let

> Thankfully, posting banned ideas or government critical stuff in the US doesn't involve being arrested by the police and being held for months or years. Let me think of groups of people in the US and if they have been treated like this - C language programmers...we'll there is Julian Assange. > no issues jailing people for speaking the wrong things, forcing it's citizens into reeducation camps, welding them locked into buildings China has more than four times the US population, yet the US incarcerates more people than China does. In that context it does not sound like much of a knock "China locks up less than a quarter of the people the US does!" Well - yes.

lisper 3y ago
> the US incarcerates more people than China does Yes, but mostly because of race, not politics. (Not that that's any better, but the underlying dynamic really is different.)
- 0000011111 3y ago
  Right the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a good primer for this concept. https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwi4l5yoyd7-AhWG8-MHHQi2C6wYABAAGgJ5bQ&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAESbeD2ASZz_7bsWiQ_5BFCAZ2wuqI0RRiv3bCQSTH4g8Pmbu2POusB9taySfFPoJNdBeMyBf2MsL7As_mYLopBuljac-mX_2Cei5VdRFe9jTZr_KyaYHn_J8174M28ix2sgqzxMwKX6cDUmiz1RW8&sig=AOD64_1ghZassSX5ETcNLYql03H3H0q7zA&q&adurl&ved=2ahUKEwiB_pGoyd7-AhX0kYkEHbt1AUoQ0Qx6BAgFEAE https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEw... Same with this wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20U.S.%20Bureau,18%25%20of%20the%20female%20population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St....
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Where is the harvesting of organs chapter?
    - gmerc 3y ago
      Didn’t we discuss medical experiments on people the other day? In the Us? Feeding women and babies radioactive substances?
- eternalban 3y ago
  > the underlying dynamic really is different Is it? I believe every state, or its establishment, acts forcefully to protect against what they consider potential existential threats. Given that the Western states and their establishment are atleast 2 centuries ahead of the curve of anyone else in terms of modern state apparatus, ideological basis (...), it is natural that we will observe distinct patterns of oppression and red lines. Most of the emerging powers are acutely sensitive to ideological challenges, challenges to the legitimacy of the establishment, precisely because they are the newly arrived and insecure in their position. Someone mentioned Julian Assange. Why did US and UK come down so hard on this guy? Because he represents an existential threat: he represents dissident factions in their intelligence communities (5 eyes) and that layer of the system is central to their maintenance of power and they will -not- tolerate any challenges in that area. So the equations defining the dynamic are identical. We just need to plug in the appropriate values for the equation's variables.
  - lisper 3y ago
    > Is it? Yes. > I believe every state, or its establishment, acts forcefully to protect against what they consider potential existential threats. Of course. But just because they all have this one feature in common does not mean that they do not have additional features that distinguish them.
alpos 3y ago
You are completely dodging the other poster's central point. The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution. Those are different problems and they need to be addressed. The war on drugs must end, policing culture and policies must be corrected, the US prison system must be corrected. Other options for dealing more effectively with various social and mental health problems must be instituted. And none of that is the same as what China is doing to their people, nor does it absolve China of the wrongs it has committed. And it doesn't take the edge off of it either. Going to China can still get you locked up for reasons you don't understand because you said the wrong thing one time and forgot you even said it. That actually is a more risky situation for most people than making sure they are not buying or carrying around the wrong plants. That is what comments such as the one you are responding to are actually worried about. It's not a raw numbers game for the individual, it's a question of "how easy is it for me or people I know to go to jail for what should be trivial actions?"
- yunohn 3y ago
  > The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution. You completely ignored OP's example of Julian Assange, I guess?
  - te234059494 3y ago
    There's a wide gap of a difference between "publishing something that is simply critical of the government" and "publishing classified / state communications", including massive information dumps of unredacted diplomatic cables. Put it this way, if you can name a country that would not react in the exact same manner to the actions that the US did to Assange's actions, please let me know. I certainly can't think of any. Wikileaks became very close to Russia in the end, anyways, not exactly a bastion of freedom and IMHO destroying any credibility Assange had. If Assange was on the "other side" and the classified stuff was from Russia, he'd probably have been "Novichoked" for what he did.

lisper 3y ago

> the US incarcerates more people than China does Yes, but mostly because of race, not politics. (Not that that's any better, but the underlying dynamic really is different.)

0000011111 3y ago
Right the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a good primer for this concept. https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwi4l5yoyd7-AhWG8-MHHQi2C6wYABAAGgJ5bQ&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAESbeD2ASZz_7bsWiQ_5BFCAZ2wuqI0RRiv3bCQSTH4g8Pmbu2POusB9taySfFPoJNdBeMyBf2MsL7As_mYLopBuljac-mX_2Cei5VdRFe9jTZr_KyaYHn_J8174M28ix2sgqzxMwKX6cDUmiz1RW8&sig=AOD64_1ghZassSX5ETcNLYql03H3H0q7zA&q&adurl&ved=2ahUKEwiB_pGoyd7-AhX0kYkEHbt1AUoQ0Qx6BAgFEAE https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEw... Same with this wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20U.S.%20Bureau,18%25%20of%20the%20female%20population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St....
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Where is the harvesting of organs chapter?
  - gmerc 3y ago
    Didn’t we discuss medical experiments on people the other day? In the Us? Feeding women and babies radioactive substances?
eternalban 3y ago
> the underlying dynamic really is different Is it? I believe every state, or its establishment, acts forcefully to protect against what they consider potential existential threats. Given that the Western states and their establishment are atleast 2 centuries ahead of the curve of anyone else in terms of modern state apparatus, ideological basis (...), it is natural that we will observe distinct patterns of oppression and red lines. Most of the emerging powers are acutely sensitive to ideological challenges, challenges to the legitimacy of the establishment, precisely because they are the newly arrived and insecure in their position. Someone mentioned Julian Assange. Why did US and UK come down so hard on this guy? Because he represents an existential threat: he represents dissident factions in their intelligence communities (5 eyes) and that layer of the system is central to their maintenance of power and they will -not- tolerate any challenges in that area. So the equations defining the dynamic are identical. We just need to plug in the appropriate values for the equation's variables.
- lisper 3y ago
  > Is it? Yes. > I believe every state, or its establishment, acts forcefully to protect against what they consider potential existential threats. Of course. But just because they all have this one feature in common does not mean that they do not have additional features that distinguish them.

alpos 3y ago

You are completely dodging the other poster's central point. The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution. Those are different problems and they need to be addressed. The war on drugs must end, policing culture and policies must be corrected, the US prison system must be corrected. Other options for dealing more effectively with various social and mental health problems must be instituted. And none of that is the same as what China is doing to their people, nor does it absolve China of the wrongs it has committed. And it doesn't take the edge off of it either. Going to China can still get you locked up for reasons you don't understand because you said the wrong thing one time and forgot you even said it. That actually is a more risky situation for most people than making sure they are not buying or carrying around the wrong plants. That is what comments such as the one you are responding to are actually worried about. It's not a raw numbers game for the individual, it's a question of "how easy is it for me or people I know to go to jail for what should be trivial actions?"

yunohn 3y ago
> The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution. You completely ignored OP's example of Julian Assange, I guess?
- te234059494 3y ago
  There's a wide gap of a difference between "publishing something that is simply critical of the government" and "publishing classified / state communications", including massive information dumps of unredacted diplomatic cables. Put it this way, if you can name a country that would not react in the exact same manner to the actions that the US did to Assange's actions, please let me know. I certainly can't think of any. Wikileaks became very close to Russia in the end, anyways, not exactly a bastion of freedom and IMHO destroying any credibility Assange had. If Assange was on the "other side" and the classified stuff was from Russia, he'd probably have been "Novichoked" for what he did.