I don’t understand how so many Americans buy the “North Korea is a cartoonish dictatorship” line so easily. It’s obvious that you can make up any story about it, no matter how outlandish, and the media will just print it uncritically.

It’s like a kid making up crazy stories about their cousin. The kid is full of shit half the time – you don’t believe the other half, you conclude that nothing that kid has to say about his cousin is reliable.

Look, Biden only pardons drug offenders who are the victims of a concerted political effort to mess with their lives.

you’re from the LARP instance

Ah yes, no one could ever have a serious issue with U.S. foreign policy

China is not a magical place where everyone just sings kumbaya all day

When you’re seriously engaging with what another person is saying

Another factor that contributes to China’s lower incarceration rates is that they often choose not to prosecute “personal” crimes. This would be things like robbery, sexual assault, etc.

Tons of these crimes aren’t prosecuted in the U.S., either, especially claims of sexual assault. And here are some sentencing guidelines from China that address both those crimes, which they don’t have just for fun.

You probably don’t understand Chinese law as much as you think you do, and you’re definitely exaggerating the idea that it’s uniquely unfair or arbitrary. Pre-trial incarceration happens all over the world, police telling suspects to confess happens all over the world, collateral consequences of arrest and imprisonment happen all over the world.

There’s also a ton of context needed to determine whether any of these things are even bad in a given situation. Pre-trial incarceration has all sorts of issues, but if someone goes on a shooting spree and has a history of not showing up to court dates for prior arrests, it’s appropriate.

it’s against the law in China to even say you don’t agree with the law

Your link doesn’t support this, and it’s nonsense on its face, anyway.

“Do not oppose the basic principles established by the Constitution” is not “you can’t even say you disagree with the law,” as anyone familiar with the difference between a constitution and subordinate forms of laws (e.g., statutes) can tell you. And of course you obviously can say the constitution should be changed; how else do you think they amended it in 2018?

If you get a DUI and the state orders you to take an alcohol class, is that re-education meant to eradicate your culture?

If you do a bunch of petty thefts and the state orders you to participate in a re-entry plan that includes job training, is that re-education meant to eradicate your culture?

the US does not incarerate them just for being black

Historically, this is completely untrue. The post-Reconstruction U.S. famously had all sorts of laws designed to lock up black people for being black, as well as officially tolerated (with public officials often taking part) terror killings of black people just for being black. Even after Jim Crow, the War on Drugs was was explicitly designed to disproportionately lock up black people:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Even if you argue that today this intent has been largely wrung out of the system (which is not a given, and does not address the remaining disproportionate effects of the War on Drugs), there’s still the question of when exactly the U.S. stopped doing what you’re calling genocide and started doing non-genocidal mass incarceration.

That’s what Democrats have been telling me for the past 13 months

I just don’t believe the vast majority of “lesser evil” Democrats because I saw them turn around and enthusiastically cheer on Harris, and then act like someone shot their dog when she lost. If you’re reluctantly supporting 99% Hitler over 100% Hitler, you don’t go to 99% Hitler rallies and you don’t care when he loses.

The UN doesn’t claim China is committing genocide, even in a report that in no way paints China in a good light. The delegation from 14 Muslim-majority countries that visited Xinjiang didn’t think there was a genocide, either.

The only countries claiming there’s a genocide, and that they’re so concerned about the treatment of Muslims in China, are the ones who spent the last 20 years slaughtering millions of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. has spy satellites that can read a license plate. China could have total control over every camera in their country (lmao) and they wouldn’t be able to hide a genocide.

There’s also a point here in how if you have to kill a bunch of people to fight a movement, and still lose, that means you’re fighting a genuinely popular movement. But if it takes orders of magnitude less violence to fight a movement, and the movement fails, how popular was it to begin with?

If the evidence shows few people support the government, you believe it; if the evidence shows many people support the government, that itself is evidence of government threatening its people. This is an unfalsifiable position; you’ve just decided you don’t like the government no matter what the evidence says.

The 90% figure is also from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Do you think they had the wool pulled over their eyes?

Funny, I was just telling @Cowbee about how the tankies I see on here are insufferable & impossible to converse with.

You don’t see how writing shit like this is insufferable and impossible to converse with?

If China is a socialist state worth supporting then I’m a donkey with a laser dick :P But I’m more anarchistically inclined

Chinese state propaganda

Pretty easy to see your views on China, which sound an awful lot like the State Department’s. If I’m reading too much into what you’re saying, tell us what you really think about the PRC.

It means “anyone who does not immediately believe the most lurid rumors about the Bad Countries”

Comparing different countries’ actions in similar circumstances is the very foundation of international law. “The international community didn’t consider this similar incident a breach of international law, so it shouldn’t consider my much smaller version of the same thing a breach” isn’t whataboutism, it’s an argument advanced in and accepted by the ICJ all the time.

These types of comparisons usually aren’t even used to excuse anything, either (and they aren’t used that way here). The point of the comparison is to ask “do you have a principled opposition to this act that you would apply universally?”

I have a hard time imagining anyone who would stop listening at “communist” but not “tankie”

It’s both overused in the way you describe and yet obscure enough that only terminally-online political people have even heard of it.