[akiselev]

> The US locks up more people, but not for wrong-think. Instead our country does it for consuming the wrong plants at the wrong time, because our systems are still racist in various ways, and because we have somehow allowed prison to become a for-profit institution.

That's just the casus belli for the arrest - the real motivation changes over time. Drug laws have been used to target and disrupt various groups from Latinos and African Americans to hippies and anti-war protestors. First it was about racism and Hearst's economic interests, then about policing wrong think, then it was about the tough on crime wave, and now it's largely about protecting several lucrative industries.

[alpos]

I can go with the general feeling here, but to use that to put the US's behavior on par with China's, specifically with regard to each country's own citizens, that is definitely a point that would need some data to back it up. Data that is likely hard to get on both the US and China.

It seems that line of argument would get much deeper into how, how fairly, and on which groups, the various countries have tended to apply their laws.

For now I can fully grant that selective enforcement has and still does happen in the US. The legal system here definitely does leave that possibility open and prosecutors are elected officials, some of whom have provably gone after certain groups or individuals, hunting for a reason to put them in jail.

[sudosysgen]

US politicians have literally said that their drug laws were motivated to attack ethnic and cultural/political groups.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

“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.”

[alpos]

Agreed, Nixon was a moron, basically everything his administration did was truly awful. The war on drugs must end, the people put in jail for having or consuming the wrong plants must be released, and the US government should make amends with those people. Anyone still alive who provably participated in that should go to jail for the rest of their lives, ideally occupying the same cells as the people they unjustly locked away.

The process of repairing the damage that was done should include large payouts for unjustly taking away years of those people's lives, if nothing else. I'm not exactly holding my breath on these points, but if we take seriously the idea that the world should become more fair and just over time, we're going to have to square with the wrongs that were committed in the name of unjust laws.

In the post you are responding to, what you see is me acknowledging that, in order to answer the specific questions: "Is the US just as bad as China on this?" or "Is what China does to it's citizens in order to suppress wrong-think being unfairly criticized in light of what the US does to it's citizens in order to suppress drug use and generally be racist about it?"; one would require good data on just how many citizens are sent to jail for what should be trivial acts of speaking their mind or consuming weird plants, and that data is unlikely to be available or good data if it exists since both countries have rather large incentives to make sure it doesn't.

Please also note that I fully granted Akiselev's point that selective enforcement happens in the US even now. There should be genuine outrage over this until it is changed. However, I understand why people can't even keep up with the sheer scale of the bullshit modern governments get up to.