This kind of reductionist pithy comparison needs to stay on Reddit. Sure stuff is messed up here, but there are very real differences in both the degree and breadth of government abuse of power when you compare with China.
As an American, I can freely oppose the current regime. I routinely say, both online and in real life under my government name, that Donald Trump and his cronies are criminals, that everyone should work hard to stop them from achieving their goals and ideally they should all get life sentences once we throw them out of office. I’ll never face legal or even professional consequences for saying this, and even within the most authoritarian regime in generations few officials argue that I should.
Unless I’ve been severely misinformed, someone saying similar things about Xi Jinping on a Chinese tech forum would be swiftly banned and likely arrested.
I'm commenting on an article about an American advocacy group filing a lawsuit accusing high-ranking government officials of misconduct, another thing that similarly situated people in China cannot do. Again, happy to admit the possibility I could be wrong: are there cases I don't know about where Chinese citizens file lawsuits accusing the Ministry of State Security of misconduct?
The content of the lawsuit argues, correctly in my view, that American speech protections are so strong they go beyond mere criticism. American citizens have a right to publish detailed information about the location of government agents, even if this information makes law enforcement harder and even if the agents fear being tracked might be dangerous for them.
Thank you. Your reply is more respectful than I earned.
On paper americans have all these rights, but surely you are seeing how the paper is not matching the reality in many ways, and very little is being done to fix that as tens of millions of americans outright support the paper being ignored, so how can you trust that disparity to not come for your paper rights to speak? Already those same courts you are relying on have thrown away real rights, and the administration itself flouts those same courts regularly.
Chinese citizens have a lot of rights on paper too, including right to freedom of expression. I would bet you could find occasional cases or situations in China where some lowly citizen "wins" against the government, as that always looks good, but that doesn't make it meaningful and I can't read or speak any Chinese languages to back up this suspicion.
It's only going to take one Supreme Court case to change the paper rights. Do you feel this supreme court has shown a preference for principles over administration?
I mostly don't agree that the paper isn't matching the reality. The Trump regime does a lot of terrible things, and works hard to create the impression that this means they're omnipotent and can do whatever terrible things they want to anyone who steps out of line, and I think it's entirely correct to be stressed and worried that one day they might be able to put that into practice. But today it's not so. A guy yelled to Trump's face that he's a pedophile protector last month (https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/ford-worker-keeping-job...), and Trump could not do anything in response other than impotently flip him off.
