Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

> Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.

Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.

But if I lived in either one of those places... whooooa boy. I'd have to be a different person to not get in trouble. And I wouldn't call myself much of an activist or pot-stirrer, really. I feel bad for people who want to show public dissent of their government in China or Russia but can't (or do, and end up in jail), and for people in marginalized groups that the government doesn't like.

View on HN

> > Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy. > > Only in the sense that, as a US citizen who has no desire to travel to China or Russia, I don't feel all that worried that either country is going to do anything bad to me directly.

I sort of get this PoV, but on the other hand…

If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.

The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.

>The US government has legal safeguards against this, and would face _massive_ potential political risk for doing so against one of its own citizens.

The US government literally steals cash money from its citizens and faces no repercussions whatsoever. If you carry cash with you in the US, you're in absolute danger of having it confiscated by the police as "drug money" and never seeing it again. You can claim the US has "legal safeguards", but until they're actually tested, it's just a supposition.

Local governments do that. I think the US federal government has to follow a different set of more stringent rules.

The federal government has done nothing about these actions by the local governments, so this is a distinction without a difference.

The US has a very large voting bloc composed of people who want their state and municipality to be free from restrictions imposed by the federal government. In practice, this leads to many places with a significantly larger amount of actually-experienced tyranny than you get in more uniformly governed countries. Ideally, this is coupled with freedom of movement, so that it's easy to get a job and housing in a state or city with more liberal governance.

They actually have. The Supreme Court had a recent ruling, congress has passed laws to try and restrict it (to the best that federal rules can affect local state ones). The distinction definitely is important, but if you have an ideological bone to pick, it’s better to ignore it.

If you actually believe that then you are amazingly ignorant about the legal structure of the USA and its dual sovereignty system. You should ask your civics teacher for a refund.

You think China and Russia don't do a hundred times worse to their citizens? The US is far from perfect, but it is drastically better than China and Russia.

Whataboutism. I never claimed they were better (and you're right, they're much worse). But the US is the one that claims to be the world leader in defending freedom and individual liberty. China never made any such claim that I know of.

> If China had any information about you that was valuable for any purpose whatsoever (trade an intelligence tip to a corrupt businessman in a mafia state?) its government could do so with no legal or political safeguards.

You should look up how Israel actively fishes LGBT palestinian people using fake dating site accounts, and threatens to out them in order to force them to contribute intelligence.

The US is clearly not that compromised. But they're not exactly clean either, considering some of the stuff that happened in central America.

Snowden will disagree with you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com