Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0
13 days ago
It skips important details such as courts, juries, and due process. It's a cynical view that the US legal system must work the same way as in authoritarian Communist China.
It sounds like a view that someone living in such a system would have. That your system is equally bad but at least ours is across an ocean. Is it a false equivalence?
America is still jailing a lot more people than any other modern country. So either your point is irrelevant and the system doesn't work or it's simply the criminal hotspot of western the world
No, it's not false equivalence. You seem to be completely missing the point.
Let's say that there's a major terrorist attack that uses a freight train as a bomb. Let's say that it took very careful, long term observation of trains in order to gather the information that made the attack possible. Let's say that in response, Congress passes legislation that makes it illegal to loiter in a location where you can watch railroad traffic. But my hobby is watching trains, and I think "surely that can't be constitutional", so I keep doing it. Homeland Security looks at my location data from my phone and has me arrested. I go to court and the jury finds me guilty because that's the law and watching trains is a really weird hobby that none of them identify with. In a decade the Supreme Court rules that the law is unconstitutional, and I go free. Due process worked (eventually), but it still ruined a decade of my life.
Now let's say that instead, Chairman Xi gets paranoid and decides that it's dangerous to allow people to watch trains. He issues a decree to that effect. Also, he (or his intelligence services) can get access to my location data, and can see that I'm hanging out by railroad lines watching trains. And there's not a thing he can do about it - not without conquering the United States first.
So, no, it's not false equivalence. I absolutely value due process and jury trials. I'm glad I live in the US and not in China. But I also am aware that even in the US, law enforcement at times oversteps their authority and the rules. We have layers of protections, and those layers of protections usually work in the end (there are those who would accuse me of being blindly optimistic here).
But for all China's problems, and lack of democracy, and lack of due process, and all that, they can't jail me. The US is my problem; China isn't. (And keeping the protections the US offers is my problem - or my responsibility, if you prefer. Keeping protections against unreasonable search and seizure is part of that.)
I appreciate the explanation. The argument that China can't throw you in jail is technically correct but ignores all of the things that they can do to you. They won't throw you in jail they only seek to erode and nullify the West.
I'm not worried about jail as much as I'm worried about surveillance of my friends and family for profile building, blackmail, staging cyber attacks on power grids and water treatment, and harassing journalists to name a few. They can and are currently doing those things on a massive scale.
I also worry about those things. China (and Russia, and Iran) are definitely trying to "erode and nullify the West"; I worry about they succeeding. I worry that, at least in part, they are succeeding.
But as the saying is, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." The West could erode itself, too - by giving too much ability to spy on citizens to the powers that be. The more power, the more it can be misused, and the more incentive to get in power it gives to someone willing to misuse it. I also worry about that danger.