[jasmer]

Moral relativism between US and China is unfathomable. They are not remotely comparable on the whole.

China has a Dictator, a total absence of a Justice System, total surveillance and censorship, and large swaths of the population of some regions in concentration camps, a large number of individual dedicated to holding in place that apparatus.

Meanwhile you're free to walk down the street and tell the US President he's an idiot and you're not going anywhere without the entire US media knowing about it if they want to put public eyes on it for the sake of your own rights. There are laws, all sorts of controls, Judicial oversight, yada yada.

As if that even needs to be said.

[supercheetah]

No such comparison was being made. The issue is whether or not the US or Chinese government affect our lives more, and since there's no danger of China trying to invade the US anytime soon, it's obviously the former. The Chinese don't care about watching the average person.

[mulmen]

> The Chinese don't care about watching the average person.

Citation needed. How much value does intimate knowledge of individual preference and habit have for psyops? How much of an advantage does China gain when they convince a democratic electorate that their actions are no big deal?

[jasmer]

The CCP monitors everyone (including you and I), and we live in an interconnected world, this idea of 'they're not about to invade' is not really the point.

If China had it's way, they would not 'invade' Taiwan either, we would wake up one day and realize the process happened over 20 years and that Taiwan is under CCP control.

And that Vietnam, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, Korea are also subject to arbitrary power of the CCP a little bit like Lukashenko in Belarus is a stooge of Putin.

That's what the surveillance is for.

[tsimionescu]

I had no such intention, I had hoped I made that clear. China is a terrible dictatorship, and the US, for all its faults, is a democracy with a mostly working justice system.

However, in whatever state you live in, your local government is far and away the most likely to care about your habits, to want to convince you to vote against your interests, to accuse you based on flimsy evidence etc. A foreign country poses nowhere near the same risk, even if it's the worse regime in history and you live in the best.