• The USA has the highest incarcerated population in the world. Per capita it’s about 2-4x the list of “authoritarian” states that usually get referenced.

    Do you want to do a quick compare on the rates of extrajudicial killings as well?

    I don’t know what better quantitative measurement for “authoritarian” are than life and liberty. Do you have better ones?

    • While this is true I’m not sure what that has to do with authoritarianism. I think the reasons for incarceration speak far more to what is authoritarian and what isn’t. A thousand people incarcerated for murder isn’t authoritarian, a single person jailed for speech is. The US doesn’t have a perfect track record there but it’s far better than most other countries.

              • Yeah, Yunnan is an entirely different province than Xinjiang, the one where the reported abuses towards Uyghur are taking place.

                and guess why I couldn’t find an official and transparent statistic

                Because we can’t speak Chinese and China publishes such stuff in Chinese language maybe?

                because china is very authoritarian

                Chinese people feel differently about that, they consistently rate their country as a democracy much more than, say, US citizens do.

                • > Because we can’t speak Chinese and China publishes such stuff in Chinese language maybe?

                  a lot of eu countries publish theirs in english too for the sake of transparancy, but ok

                  > Chinese people feel differently about that, they consistently rate their country as a democracy much more than, say, US citizens do.

                  funny, when was the last (fair) election in china? also the reason chinese people don’t tell journalists how shitty their lives are is because they could get into a concentration camp reeducation camp for saying that and don’t forget that all of that is for nothing since china got the highest millionair density in the world and thus can’t be really communist imo and don’t start me on holy xi trying to hide homelessness

                  • Look, Chinese people reportedly care more about democracy and feel more in a democracy than USians, according to a study in Europe! Let’s now proceed to ignore all of that because they’re afraid of getting sent to labor camps, even when the prison population in the US is larger than in China while having 1/5th of the population!

                    For the record, I’m not particularly a fan of the Chinese model, it’s just that the situation in the US is so bad that it’s going to make almost anything look great in comparison lmao

        • No, its a hallmark of an authoritarian rule, not the proof of one. Believe it or not many places in history have been right bastards and have also been anti-authoritarian (think french revolution, the start of most communist revolutions, etc.) sometimes they are so anti-authoritarian they end up authoritarian.

      • Homicide rate is far less than other countries.

        People are jailed and murdered in the US over “speech” all the time.

        It seems like your “us is far better” is based purely on vibes… Unless you’ve got some numbers you’d like to share?