We have huge problems with policing in this country, no doubt. This is simply not comparable to the systemic oppression and persecution of political and ethnic undesirables in places like China.
Note that millions of us Americans who are disgusted with systemic racism and authoritarian overreach in our country are free to discuss it openly, assemble in opposition, and vote our conscience. Do you imagine a person in China is likewise free to engage in a public discussion about Uyghur concentration camps?
In the US (and most open democracies, probably) - propagandists are warring with other propagandists, in a perpetual contest for influence and power. Nearly everyone is aware that there are tremendous amounts of misinformation and propaganda being thrown at them every day. And its not just Democrats vs Republicans. Its also corporations, activists, advertisers, or even other nation states, etc.
People are quite good at recognizing the propaganda from other bubbles that aren't their own (hence everyone on the left seeing Fox News for what is... and everyone on the right seeing CNN/MSNBC for what they are). Many of the resources within each bubble are dedicated to exposing the propaganda of other bubbles. A bubble's inhabitants do less well at recognizing and acknowledging the propaganda of their own bubble, however.
Democracies are basically (thought) bubble blowing contests.
Its not quite the market place of ideas we wanted or hoped for... but its what we have today, and its still preferable to the alternative, where there's only one despot-controlled bubble - and so we don't even realize that bubbles exist at all - or if we do, we don't mention it out loud, if we know whats "good" for us.
No, that's not the only point you've been arguing. In response to the assertion that American dissidents are not jailed or killed as a matter of policy, you responded with this:
> Plenty of people were jailed in the occupy wall street peaceful demonstrations. Open your eyes.
My argument is that this is a bullshit, apples-to-oranges distraction. I'm sorry to be so blunt.
> Americans have no idea they are being fed propaganda.
What "Americans" are you talking about? You're talking to an American right now. There are millions of us fully aware that we're swimming in spin, biased reporting, and government misinformation. If anything, seeing propaganda everywhere we look has become a bit of an American pastime. Regardless, look around at this forum; I can't count how many heated debates we've had on HN about the dark, rotten corners of this country's past and present. Everything from the genocide of the Native Americans to the Lost Cause, the Iraq War, Snowden, what have you.
It's bizarre that you can invoke the deaths of American protesters at the hands of the police, and then condemn Americans' collective gullibility and disinterest as though it's somehow comparable, in any fucking way whatsoever, to things like the Great Firewall. They are not comparable.
You and I agree on more things than not. But on some topics like this, I really think you get carried away with sweeping and reactionary generalizations that don't help your case.
All of this is widely talked about in the United States where we debate the legitimacy of drone warfare, the history and legacy of racism, and the missteps of American foreign policy. We read Howard Zinn in my (public) High School history class.
You appear to want to debate "whether America is evil" or something but I'm talking about a distinction between manufacture-of-consent propaganda and state control of speech and dissidence, which does not exist in the United States.
> You appear to want to debate "whether America is evil" or something
No. I have no interest in saying that at all. I have not said that anywhere in this comment thread.
All I started out saying, and am continuing to say is that the major difference with propaganda in the USA is that the vast majority of Americans have no idea they are subjected to it, and would get angry if it was pointed out to them.
That's all.
> state control of speech and dissidence, which does not exist in the United States
> All I started out saying, and am continuing to say is that the major difference with propaganda in the USA is that the vast majority of Americans have no idea they are subjected to it, and would get angry if it was pointed out to them.
This just doesn’t jive with my experience growing up in what was (at the time) a fairly conventional somewhat conservative state (Virginia). We were exposed to Zinn and Manufacturing Consent in our public school. We learned about slavery, Indian extermination, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, etc. We learned about our interventions in Latin America and Iran. Socialism and the labor movement was taught very sympathetically. For example, we were taught that Upton Sinclair’s “the Jungle” was muckraking journalism. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that the novel was intended to be socialist propaganda. We certainly were never we exposed to the contemporaneous criticism of Sinclair: https://fee.org/articles/29-upton-sinclairs-the-jungle-prove...
If anything, I’d argue the propaganda was in the other direction. America was almost always painted in a bad light, except for two things: the founding, and WWII. (Although, teachers are already trying to delegitimize our founding by incorporating material from the 1619 project.) We never learned all the bad things about the Soviet Union, or socialism as tried in Latin America.
We are among the top in terms of college education rates: On other measures, the US does great. It has long been among the top countries for college attainment: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cac.asp
There are some indicators where the US doesn’t do as well. For example, life expectancy at age 65 is on the lower end, six months less than the UK and about the same as Denmark and Poland: https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-65.htm. Though the fact that Denmark and Poland are the same should indicate that the measure is highly sensitive to demographic and cultural factors. (Sweden, Germany, and the UK are closer to the US than they are to France or Spain.)
> Plenty of people were jailed in the occupy wall street peaceful demonstrations.
Occupy Wall Street protestors were not all “peaceful.” They sometimes got violent or destructive, and they were arrested, but that‘s not a bad thing. It’s happening in France too: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/france-scores-yellow-.... There is a huge difference between arresting rowdy protestors and imprisoning political dissidents.
> Also includes executing American citizens without trial
By that you mean ordering a military attack on an American citizen who was waging war against the US on foreign soil. Again, huge difference between that and executing citizens on US soil for political offenses.
> testing on huamns against their consent
Yes, that was bad. But not as bad as experiments in collective farming killing tens of millions of people!
> overthrowing democratically elected leaders
Not clear that this is bad.
> I could go on and on.
The fact you're inside it, and being subjected to it, means you can't see it clearly.
You can go on and on, but can you present any examples that are actually equivalent? Your examples, presumably the best ones you have, are utterly superficial. What’s the equivalency you’re hoping to draw between taking military action against a terrorist on foreign soil, who happens to have US citizenship, and massive political purges? It’s not even just a matter of “both are bad, but one involves more instances of the bad thing.” The moral calculus is completely different. How are you supposed to even handle a US citizen who wages terrorist attacks on the US from abroad. It’s not like you can send police to arrest them. Whether it’s ultimately “bad” or not, the ethical calculation is completely different.
> That's why I said it's interesting 'siracusa23' can. He/she has more perspective than you (and I'm willing to bet the majority of Americans)
There are millions of Americans who have first hand experience with socialism and communism, and many are among the most fervent defenders of the American way. There are 1.5 million Cuban Americans in Florida, and Donald Trump won a majority of their vote: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/100-republ.... These are people for whom the distant memory of communism is so powerful that they’ll hold their nose and vote for the Republican candidate regardless of the odious things he’s said about immigrants. Nationwide, a supermajority of Hispanics (60-20) said they wouldn’t vote for someone who called themselves a “socialist”: https://www.latinorebels.com/2019/11/07/telemundopoll. These are people who have (or their families have) experience with the dismal failures of socialism in Latin America.
By all the measures that actually indicate how life is for the average person on the street, not just the ones about how much stuff you use up.
The US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child poverty, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, rate of obesity, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use, incarceration rate, rate of assaults, rate of homicides, income inequality, wealth inequality, and economic mobility.
In many of those, it's 2x to 5x worse than other countries.
How much stuff they can buy and how big their house is is a big part of what the average person on the street considers to be relevant metrics of prosperity. I wouldn’t trade an extra 6 months of life expectancy like in the UK for a house half the size like in the UK, and I suspect most other Americans wouldn’t either.
As to your other indicators, are you really talking about the “average person” or the poorest people? Because there is a big difference, and in the US we have deliberately chosen to optimize for lower taxes on the middle class at the expense of weaker safety nets for the lowest class. Take, for example, income mobility. For the top 80% it’s similar between the US and Denmark: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012.... Someone born in the second to lowest quantile, for example, has a similar shot at rising to the top quantile in the US and Denmark.
As to health indicators it’s similar, although also complicated by demographic and diet differences. Asian Americans have the longest life expectancy of pretty much anyone in the world, including people in Hong Kong, Singapore, or Japan. It’s not because there is an alternate, Asian only health system. It’s because Asian Americans are largely outside the bottom quantile, and a lot of the things that drag down the US in the overall average are a function of very bad results in the bottom quantile.
