Right and the government is paying me to say this on HN of all places.
>A radical and undefended claim. In what way is this true? You never say.
I thought this was obvious. Snowden did not have freedom of speech to reveal that the government was spying on its own citizens. You do not have the freedom of speech to threaten others. You do not have the freedom of speech to lie and slander about someone, it is literally in the law and people can sue you for this. Literally the law in the united states controls your speech using the justification of "security." China uses the exact same excuse. Is it a valid excuse? in both cases, I'm not sure. Definitely the US is more lax on these laws then China overall, but the atrocities done by the US on snowden is only one aspect of a country and it does not define the entire regime or its people.
>A single-party regime with no term limits on executive power is a stark contrast with a representative democratic federation designed with a multitude of checks and balances on its own power structures.
Right, vs. a government where people in power can (and are regularly) bribed with corporate money. Checks and balances in the united states is a check written as a bribe with a balance of over a million.
>Those two things are indeed important, defining characteristics of the two countries you describe. One of them was an act of world war decades ago. The other is current events, the result of an illegal act of oppression by a dystopian communist state, heavily indicative of what China is today.
Yeah the wholesale slaughter of millions of innocent civilians during wartime is excused with a couple of decades vs. a fucking protest happening right now can't be excused and must be used to define an entire nation and its people. That's not the point. The point, is the united states was never defined entirely by the bomb. You still are a country separate in culture and identity from a nuclear bomb or imperfections within the government.
China is largely the same thing. However because they are economic rivals with the US the media largely magnifies the things they do. You really need to go and live their to see that it's not as horrible as the media makes it out to be.
The LGBT person above feared for his life. That's next level brain washing right there.