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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

What I find most interesting about this is that US tech companies are doing what people accuse China of doing.

In fact, theoretical Chinese informed was the entire (performative) justification for the Tiktok ban. The reality of course was that TikTok wouldn’t censor what the US government wanted to censor.

The irony is that these companies are sowing the seeds for their own destruction and the US government is undermining US tech dominance, which is a potent foreign policy tool.

I think Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave at Tim Cook’s capitalization. I once trusted Apple to be more user-forest than any other platform. Now? I think I’d trust Huawei more.

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At this point I think the biggest tangible difference between China and the US is that one country has high speed trains and affordable health care and the other has neither.

No one's murdering innocent citizens on the streets of China

No the murders happen in camps eg. What's happening to the Uyghurs.

That said, they also use them as slave labors.

Maybe that's what ICE is going to do with the plan to setup large detention centers in the US

Look up the "zero idleness" program at CECOT where the Trump administration is sending deportees.

They've been successfully blocked (for now). No current deportees are headed there so far as I know. But they are busy trying to build the system right here at home.

ICE detention is already beginning to resemble the Salvadoran prison system.

Due process rights get violated. Detainees get shuttled around to different facilities to be lost in the system through engineered incompetence, making it difficult for legal counsel or family to find them, or even to know who has been taken. They subject them to torturous conditions, abuse, and often hold people who've committed no crimes for months.

They are thwarting oversight and defying court orders left and right. And they are trying to scale up like 10x+. And once they do, the detention system won't just be for immigrants. They are going to target anyone they want.

D's have successfully blocked DHS funding for now, but if they (or SCOTUS) allow any of this to go forward, things are likely to get far worse

While it's correct to criticize China's authoritarian policies and lack of civic and religious freedoms that are often taken for granted here, it's still very much a pot-calling-the-kettle-black situation. The US's treatment, both historical and modern, of it's black, native, and immigrant populations have been just as or even more brutal than China's crackdown on Islamism. Mass incarceration and criminalization of the poorest sections of society in the US are at levels far beyond what exists in any other country in the world. Political corruption and nepotism have been normalized for decades, and the deep-seated culture of elite impunity is apparent in the total lack of consequences from the Epstein files. US citizens should not be wasting time criticizing other countries for problems our own country has yet to fix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...

Uh.This has happened plenty. It's pretty well known that there's a lot of various abductions/disappearances of people the Chinese govt doesn't like. Including outright deaths in the streets:

https://rsf.org/en/beaten-death-state-security-rsf-shocked-g...

This is an especially hilarious comment given what happened in June 1989 [1].

It's the prototypical example of authoritarian crackdowns and mass slaughter of innocent protestors.

Discussion or even mention of it is still forbidden in China.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

Going back 35 years to point out a time when protestors were killed is always a strange thing to me. You can go back just a few weeks until you reach a point where the US killed protestors. Then there's stuff like the Black Lives Matter protests where the US government violently suppressed protests and people died/disappeared.

If 1989 is all a country has as a problem, then that's a sign it's doing great.

There are plenty of other more recent examples in this thread.

I was simply replying to the original statement that China doesn't kill protesters in the street. The notion is so risible that in hindsight it may well have been sarcasm or bait.

But, if you wish to expand the scope of this discussion, sure. There are several clear distinctions between the (horrible) events you list and what happened in Tiananmen Square.

The most obvious is that we are free to talk about them now. I submit that the Chinese state's continued censorship of the subject is a sign that (1) the state is still complicit in these crimes and (2) it is not "doing great".

The scale of brutality is also just incomparable. I say this fully agreeing the events you list were terrible. The horrors committed at Tiananmen Square were simply on another level.

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.

Care to elaborate?

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.

Buddy what article do you think you are currently commenting on?

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.

Trump complained to Ford about it and they immediately suspended him without pay.

What protected him wasn't being in America - it's that he had a strong union. Which most Americans don't have.

The US regime allows its citizens to criticize politicians. That doesn't mean you are free to criticize those in power.

Yes, actually, it means just that.

these days the us government (well trump) will let you speak when your speak is inconsequential but will repress when you have a little bit of reach (universities, research, tv shows etc.). and he is modifying the system in order to reinforce his ability to do so (putting his people everywhere he should not).

but yes, you can criticize as much as you want as long as nobody is listening to you (for now).

in europe we are getting close to parity with china in this aspect though.

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