[roenxi]

It is easy to complain generally, but is is better to be specific about what ways you think America is not free. Americans still enjoy great freedom of speech and association, for example. No Lèse-majesté in the land of the free. There is a lot of propaganda but that isn't necessarily inconsistent with freedom.

The real issue is there is a risk that economically speaking America is less free than China. For all that what China does with intellectual property is illegal under American law, it is very free. The US would for sure like them to be a little less free with IP. America's policies over interest rates also look decidedly like the sort of thing that a centrally planned economy would try and execute; it handicaps building savings which might give China an advantage if they are more middle-class-savings-tolerant.

That is balanced by the strictly superior American rule of law, for all its warts. But America has given themselves some interesting competitive handicaps.

POSTSCRIPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven... For reference, China has a ratio of 4:1 private to public income vs America with a 2.6:1 ratio. Technically, China might be running a smaller government. Or lying, it is hard to know.

POSTPOSTSCRIPT Hong Kong and Taiwan are nearly 9:1. Capitalist paradise is in Asia. Nothing lower down the list looks appealing to me.

[olefoo]

> That is balanced by the strictly superior American rule of law

The rule of law is looking pretty tattered and worn in the US of A right now. What with the President committing obstruction of justice in plain view and his AG declaring that a sitting President may not be indicted for any crime.

Not to mention the grotesque violations of human rights that are happening at the network of concentration camps the current administration has repurposed.

[adventured]

The US is not running a network of concentration camps.

A hundred thousand illegal immigrants per month are being caught crossing into the US through the southern border.

No other liberal democracy - from Canada to Finland to Japan to Australia - would tolerate such a flood of illegal immigration. Not even remotely close. Canada freaks out when a couple thousand illegal immigrants cross into its territory from the US in a given month.

Holding illegal immigrants in detention facilities, because there is nowhere else to put them until they can be processed, is not the same thing as a concentration camp. Claiming that they're the same thing is a gross abuse of the term and its history.

[root_axis]

Separating kids from their parents and allowing them to die in cages is not necessary no matter one' stance on immigration.

[alephr]

It would help your argument if you could cite that number and show that it's part of a significant trend.

[pjc50]

The family separation policy is, however, purely punitive.

[kazagistar]

No other "liberal democracy" has spent decades destabilizing democratically elected regimes, propping up dictators, and applying economic sanctions in nearby nations in the name of fighting communism, causing a massive flood of refugees fleeing those nations.

Why can't America try paying the cost of its actions for once, instead of pushing those costs on innocent families and children fleeing famine and violence?

[danharaj]

Call a spade a spade. It's a concentration camp because it's a camp where undesirable people are concentrated. The fact that you think it's justified to employ concentration camps is a separate argument.

[CapricornNoble]

By your very broad definition, so is a PRISON. Which would mean every country on the planet runs "concentration camps", and render the term meaningless.

[AnthonyMouse]

"Concentration camp" has a specific connotation. Calling this a concentration camp is like calling a terminal cancer ward a "death camp" because people go there to die.

Fault Trump with everything that's his fault, but suggesting that this is a precursor to mass graves and genocide is just hyperbole.

[HillaryBriss]

> "Concentration camp" has a specific connotation.

In my personal experience, "concentration camp" has been applied specifically to mean the camps operated by the German government in the 1930's and 40's, camps which intentionally tortured and murdered millions of innocent Jews, and certain other "undesirables" and enemies of the Nazi regime.

When I hear that term, I personally think of emaciated prisoners wearing striped uniforms, packed into cramped wooden shelves. I think of hopeless people peering out from behind barbed wire fences suffering under a regime of forced labor and starvation. I think of horrific death chambers filled with poison gas and choking, dying human beings and towering piles of dead bodies.

I personally can't get those images out of my head when I hear the term "concentration camp" and I would guess most other people in the US conjure up the same images specifically tied to Nazi Germany when they hear that term.

But NPR has an interesting article about the meaning and historical usage of "concentration camp." The subject arose when someone used the term to describe the sites where Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated during WWII.

https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/02/10/1466917...

[olefoo]

The use of concentration camps as part of a planned ethnic cleansing campaign originated with the American governments efforts to relocate and exterminate the indigenous populations of the Southeastern United States see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal_Act if you want to pick up the trail.

[danharaj]

> Calling this a concentration camp is like calling a terminal cancer ward a "death camp" because people go there to die.

No, it isn't. Concentration camps have existed throughout history and they haven't always been associated with genocide. But, you know, they do have a connotation of being associated with violations of human rights which is exactly what people are alleging about these detention sites.

The fact that it's not literally the holocaust doesn't mean it's not a concentration camp.

[neonate]

That's true. But post-holocaust, the term came to mean the holocaust camps. Growing up, I never heard it used any other way. For example I never heard the camps in which the US and Canada put their Japanese citizens in WWII called concentration camps, though in the original sense they were. Rather they were called internment camps, because by then "concentration camp" had come to be associated with the holocaust. So there's a semantic sleight of hand in people reviving the term for political use now. They're taking advantage of the extreme associations it now has, while protesting that they don't mean it that way.

[AnthonyMouse]

> No, it isn't. Concentration camps have existed throughout history and they haven't always been associated with genocide.

It still is, because a "concentration camp" even in that sense still isn't just any camp where people are concentrated. It implies internment without charges, which is exactly what isn't happening here -- there is every expectation that there will be a proceeding to determine their immigration status, resulting in either release or deportation and not indefinite internment in violation of habeas corpus.

> But, you know, they do have a connotation of being associated with violations of human rights which is exactly what people are alleging about these detention sites.

Then make that claim and not the other one. If they have no access to soap then assert that as the thing that needs to be fixed -- because at least that can be fixed. How do you make a detention facility not a "concentration camp" under a definition of "concentration camp" that just means any detention facility?

[cmurf]

Completely false in every way including the appeal to history.

The 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees grants refugees very specific rights that are absolutely being violated by this policy, and the term "concentration camp" has been used in many other cases other than WWII concentration camps to mean exactly the thing the U.S. is doing to refugees on the southern border. I definitely consider them concentration camps, while as yet not being death camps. There already should be holy hell to pay for having done yet again what we promised never to do the last time we had concentration camps, for Japanese-American citizens.

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/editorial/2019/06/22/tribune-...

[cmurf]

>better to be specific

The word nation is not found in either the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution. I consider nationalism, nationalistic movements, to be anti-freedom, they engender only division, hatred, enemy seeking, scapegoating, and laws to protect and enhance such things. Who is free in the U.S.? Perhaps citizens? There is even a movement that only natural born citizens are real citizens, and naturalized citizens are second class and could have citizenship stripped from them after the fact if they violate certain laws. It's not enough to imprison them, they have to be stripped of citizenship, in this view.

What about all persons within the U.S. are they free? The constitution applies mostly to persons, not just citizens. Most all individual rights and protections apply to persons; citizens get some extra privileges like holding federal public office. And yet a great many Americans are very confused about this, thinking constitutional law, rights and protections only apply to citizens.

Therefore I put nationalism as my specific enemy of the American dream, and of freedom. Patriotism is quite nice, in particular as it relates to America as an asylum for most of its history. But when patriotism is infected with nationalism, it becomes jingoism, and that's dangerous. Eventually no one is free.

[a3n]

Ah, the first amendment.

Yes, we do still have freedom of speech and association.

But the govt is attacking freedom of religion through "religious freedom" laws that allow discrimination against people who don't follow Christian behavior, in the opinion of any random Christian.

The president attacks the free press, labeling them traitors and "enemy of the people."

When part of the 1st amendment is under attack, all of it is.

The president says if you plead the 5th, you must be guilty.

The president wants to delay the census until he gets the answer that he wants from the supreme court.

When some of the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution in general, are under attack, then all of it is.

We are at risk of losing what was thought rock solid, and so we are that much less free. We may still be better off than some, but we are slowly losing that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...

[pjc50]

Yesterday's "unfree America" story was the woman who was shot in the stomach and then prosecuted for the death of her unborn child. In Alabama.