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Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

How do you know this isn't what happened in China? Also, the underlying causes being addressed is like saying that redlining no longer exists because its not called that or that racism is gone because we no long live in Jim Crow times. The US has not moved on from that time nor has it gotten any better than the kent state shooting. If anything these conditions have worstened and when these shootings and lynchings happen now they dont even get mainstream news coverage.

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I understand that you're unhappy with the state of things in the US, but setting up a false equivalence with China doesn't make your case.

The simple fact that we can have this discussion without fear of imprisonment is strong evidence that when it comes to censorship (the topic of this post), the US is still way more open than China.

Im curious by what metric things are improving in the US? I get that people are very defensive of their ability to say nearly anything they want in public but how has this protected us? The overton window continues to shift to the right, we continue to fund more and more war, the security state continues to expand, our actual privacy from the state itself is non-existent.

Again, i understand the desire for "freedom of speech" as it is mythologized in the US. I was born and raised here. But we do an absolute crap job of making an argument for it by our actions. The second you take that speech outside to the street with signs and a megaphone, no matter how many forms you fill out, you'll get beaten to within an inch of your life by security forces if the message you're making is, for example, anti-cop.

I am by in no way making any claim about China or defending their speech protections. What im trying to say is that even if we accept that there is true freedom of speech in the US (which im not sure i agree with) where has it gotten us? If you think conditions for anyone in the US who isn't wealthy have improved in the past 40 years then im not really sure what to say. About all we have left is the fact that legally you cant be arrested for social media posts. In general. Most of the time.

I never said things are improving in the US.

That’s precisely my point. Where do you live? The west? If not, whatever. But if you do then this is typical of what happens when you try to criticize the US. People do backbends to avoid the cold facts that regardless of what we WANT to be true of neoliberalism it’s a failed project and other modes of providing for people have outpaced it.

> the underlying causes being addressed is like saying that redlining no longer exists because its not called that or that racism is gone

A lot of people in America work on pointing out where redlining still exists. It was being litigated even last year [1].

China is not a responsive political system. It was designed to be responsive only over the long term, and Xi trashed even that with his dictator-for-life nonsense.

> conditions have worstened and when these shootings and lynchings happen now they dont even get mainstream news coverage

Sorry, what secret lynching are you talking about? We'd love to update the Wikipedia from its 1981 record [2].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-reaches-si...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Michael_Donald

This is precisely my point. We define a historical era with things like red lining and lynching but they never stopped. The manipulation of education and words works perfectly: there's no reason to suppress speech.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/08/modern-day-...

> We define a historical era with things like red lining and lynching but they never stopped

No, but their frequency went down. Because we didn't stop talking about it and have independent courts that let the laws be enforced indpeendent of whether the President at the time thought it was a priority.

That's the contrast with China. And by the way, we're still talking about Tiananmen. We haven't even touched Mao and the Great Leap Forward or Xi's late-Soviet style corruption [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/asia/chinas-preside...

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