Politicians getting arrested simply for holding primary elections: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55555299
Newspapers getting shut down and journalists getting arrested because they criticize the government: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/23/1009582208/hong-kongs-apple-d...
While I agree that the UK policing bill warrants concern, I think your comparison is insulting to the people in Hong Kong that now face jail time for simply printing or saying anything that is perceived as anti-government.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/no...
Occupy protesters were kicked on the ground, hauled to courts and hooked up with tens of thousands of dollars of fines for 'trespassing' on !public! property. Effectively bankrupting many, and discouraging protest for good. Since the state did not persecute them for their speech, but for 'trespassing', all is still 'democratic' in the legalese. Even if its not in practice.
I have friends in Hong Kong who fear what they post on social media will land them in jail. That was not the case pre-2020.
Can you find many individual instances of injustice in any given democracy? Sure. But you don’t seem to grasp the difference in severity and scale. There were over 10000 protestors arrested in Hong Kong in 2020 alone, out of a population of 7.5 million. None of the examples you picked are analogous to entire newspapers getting shut down and politicians getting sentenced to jail en masse.
Your original comment is still textbook whataboutism, however, and deserves its downvotes for that reason alone.
There is no problem with 'whataboutism'. Entire Angloamerican common law is based on whataboutism. Based on precedents and prior tradition.
Especially in such cases of moral, ethical or civil comparison, 'what about' is a fundamental question to ask in order to establish a logical and neutral framework. Otherwise all comparisons become meaningless and all the accusations that are levied on that framework become plain old which hunt and smears.
As in this case - Occupy protesters were beaten on the ground and hooked up with tens of thousands of dollars of fines in 2011, through an FBI-coordinated crackdown campaign that encompassed 30+ cities in the US, but hey - the US is still 'somehow' democratic. And still lectures and even smears everyone else about democracy.
Leave aside persecuting a foreign journalist for exposing its war crimes - along with its satellite UK, supposedly a beacon of freedom and democracy. Which went so far as to just violate its own laws to extradite Assange, based on the 'opinion' of the judge who 'just' found it 'okay'.
Moral, ethical comparisons require an objective framework. If one doesnt provide that, people challenge it by asking 'what about'.
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+problem+with+whataboutis...