Dang, tell that to Edward Snowden.
Snowden while having noble intentions he broke the law and he should face the consequences of his actions.
If I kill the guard to break into the CIA HQ and expose a massive scandal do I deserve jail time or a Medal of Honor? I would argue both.
Saying he broke the law is pointless, when the law is designed to be broken by dissidents.
The main responsibility is to follow the law. The other responsibility is to vote to select the correct laws to follow as a society.
Nobody knows what the correct set of laws for a society is. That is why we have regular elections to iterate upon them.
In very few cases you can see a clear cut and say definitely that a law is fair or unfair. Most of the laws lie on a spectrum, and I would argue that it is impossible to find a set of laws that are fair to all of the people, forever.
That is why dictatorships even if they start with start with good intentions (some did) they end up being oppressive regimes.
If the whole establishment and the deep state was similarly with you, you could do that in China too.
The president of the US could easily make an annoying opposing journalist disappear. But they don’t.
That is what makes America a functioning democracy and China an authoritarian regime.
Therefore the stakes are very high for the accused to take her out before any proof or testimony can be put out.
Alternatively, if you were a political oponent of the accused, you would be concerned for the safety of Peng, which you would now consider an asset, and you would, if you could, put her into what amounts to protective custody ASAP so you could defeat your rival before he can preempt it
It's game of thrones shit. And by the way, it's like that in the US too - Epstein didn't kill himself.
Biden's biggest problem by a dramatic margin, is the political center, which he has almost entirely lost already.
If the right mocking Biden had any power behind it, he would have never won the election in the first place. It was close enough at the Electoral College that if the US media landscape were 50/50 left/right, Biden would not have prevailed.
Obviously most everyone here understands that despite the flaws of the US, it generally doesn't disappear or exile as China does. The super structures that the left controls, which the right does not, do have very substantial power however (social media, big tech, hollywood, old media & news, journalism, education, welfare state).
This has become a political rallying cry, but is far from an objective truth. Just because "the left" is other to you, and those structures are other to you, does not imply that its sensible to say that those structures are controlled by "the left". Entrenched power structures are inherently conservative, with at most some feel-good progressive window dressing. That you judge them as being controlled by "the left" really just indicates how far "the right" has strayed from conservatism.
I'm in favor of prosecuting Snowden because he did substantial and potentially permanent damage to our intelligence gathering abroad.
> There’s no such thing as a whistleblower without evidence, that’s called a parish who gets ignored.
He could have gathered information, contacted appropriate members of the Senate, and launched an investigation such as the Church committee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee).
> Are you all also in favour of prosecuting the journalists who publish this material?
That depends on what they publish and whether it's determined to be illegal. Hopefully the courts would allow publication as in the Pentagon Papers case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers#The_Supreme_Co...).
Peng Shuai's situation is so far from Snowden — if you're trying to point to a parallel between the US and China, it doesn't work. The US equivalent would be if the women who accused Trump, Kavanaugh, Cuomo, etc., of sexual harassment were kidnapped by the government.
Edward Snowden ran afoul of the boundaries for freedom of speech in a first world country. If he did the same thing as a Chinese in China, they would have sent a squad to repatriate him long ago (being in Russia is just a minor inconvenience).
Just because the USA and China both have problems in this area doesn't make them anywhere near having the same scale and severity.