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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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I imagine it could be if you were a minority or a political dissident.
The fact that so many people went through sexual and gender self discovery on Tiktock, but such things are discouraged by the government in China says a lot that makes me uncomfortable.
Not being able to openly criticise the government and its policies also doesn't sit well with me.
It's not my government though, so that's where my criticism ends. If that's what the majority of people want, that's just democracy by another avenue. So long as people are allowed to leave if they choose, then that's fine.
Try being black and poor or a latino "illegal" in the US. Slave labour and summary executions in the middle of the street.
It's not a competition, and we could all do better. Even if they are worse, we're not better because of that fact.
Yeah that's the thing that a lot of Americans seem to gloss over the horror of. We've accepted the legality of execution without trial for running from the cops or looking threatening in their eyes. Doesn't matter if the cop thinks all black people look threatening. Failure to comply with verbal instructions? Death penalty, its not the cop's job to confirm that you're not deaf…
One thing I never understood with the US. With how they killed George Floyd on the street in front of everyone and they were set to get away with it - my first thought would have been that what would be different if they did that to me? I'd come up with nothing, and that's terrifying.
People are arguing about the legality of the death sentence, but a cop can kill you with impunity any day, even tomorrow, with no reason, even in your home. If you are reading this while you're trying to sleep in your bed, or sitting on the toilet, there are people who could kick down your door and murder you, legally without consequences.
How can you tune that out? How do you live like that? It wasn't like that even under communism, at least not after the 70s, and the period before left a collective trauma on half a continent.
What else would we do? Like it's not ok and we're obviously not ok. But any effort to improve things is met with state violence and further propaganda to convince half the country that we're the problem with America. I'm white, that makes me lucky when it comes to this.
You try explaining to your fellow Americans that it's horrifying that cops do this they'll say "everyone knows you need to do what the cops say and they were just a criminal anyways, and we need the cops to keep us safe." They also love to say "maybe you should experience violent crime and see how you feel about cops then." And let me say, I've experienced violent crime in the past year and my opinion of cops worsened.
But yeah huge swathes of Americans have problems with it. We marched over it in 2020, we've marched over it before and we'll do it again too. But this country is barely a democracy, we're bound between two parties, one that's pro cop but thinks they need slaps on the wrist and more training when they murder people and the other that thinks that doing that is an unacceptable level of punishment. Oh and the deck is stacked in the latter's favor.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if our nation collapses in the upcoming administration.
Don't worry, we're working on it.
Jokes aside though, not all of Europe, and we've all got our own very serious issues as well.
I do live in europe myself. The whole damn planet is like sinking ship and i'm just on the upper part of it, there is nowhere to run if it goes bad here.
I've tried a whole bunch of Europe, and there is plenty of hatred and idiocy to go around.
I fear for our future.