> Arrest people who report freely on a unjust case
> Arrest & incarcerate the lawyer of the accused
> Forces the accused, by threatening his family, to confess to crimes on video
> And then lifestream those confession videos to the world as "evidence"
> The western government do not have much control over their "justice" systems as in, they can not turn on & off cases as they feel
(Although they wish they have, and they have watered it down, by creating crimes that everyone automatically commits in recent years + selective enforcement laws)
But yeah, the west needs to get better. It always does. And so does china.
But lets take something objective- the "were does money flee towards and were from" as a measurement of law and lawlessness and watch the crypto bleed out of china were it can. I rest my case on the scale of law and lawlessness.
> Arrest people who report freely on a unjust case
Julian Assange.
Allegedly, Lauri Love.
Jake Appelbaum hasn't been arrested, but he's not doing that well either. He was harassed by law enforcement for years after his reporting on the Iraq war.
After Gary Webb's reporting revealed that the CIA had been trafficking cocaine to Los Angeles, using the money to support a terrorist campaign in Nicaragua, he wasn't arrested, but he was forced to resign, and no newspaper would hire him thereafter; he was found dead in his home with two gunshot wounds to the head. The death was ruled a suicide.
Edward Snowden fled to Russia to escape arrest.
Reality Winner has been incarcerated for five years because she revealed the Russian interference in the US election in 02016; she's still imprisoned.
Chelsea Manning was imprisoned from 02010 until 02017, and has been barred from entering Canada or Australia (which, if not in the West, is at least a close ally of the West).
John Kiriakou, who revealed the US torture of prisoners, was imprisoned for two years in 02013 to 02015.
NPR reporter Mumia Abu-Jamal covered the abuses of the notoriously corrupt Philadelphia police force and was kept under illegal surveillance by the FBI; in 01981 the police accused him of murdering a cop who had shot him after beating up his brother. At the trial, he was not allowed to represent himself, instead being represented by a court-appointed attorney he described as a "baboon". He was convicted and has been in prison for 39 years. Four years later, the Philadelphia police dropped two firebombs from a helicopter onto a townhouse owned by a group of his friends, killing eleven of them (five of them children) and burning down 65 houses.
"The west" absolutely does arrest people for reporting freely on cases of injustice. Sometimes they do more than arrest them.
Reporters Without Borders has the US at #44 in their press freedom ranking index: https://rsf.org/en/ranking
That's worse than Botswana, Taiwan, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Lithuania, Namibia, Latvia, Samoa, and New Zealand. Other countries in the west, like Belize, Chile, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, and Greece, are even further down the list. (PRC is of course near the bottom at #177.)
> Arrest & incarcerate the lawyer of the accused
True, no cases of this in EU, UK, and USA come to mind at the moment. I've known a lot of lawyers here in Argentina who have been threatened with this, but none that it has happened to since the end of the US-supported dictatorship 37 years ago.
> Forces the accused, by threatening his family, to confess to crimes on video
I think you would be surprised at what goes on in grand jury cases. It's not quite the same: by threatening the family of the accused, the government "forces" them to testify against the accused in secret, and not tell the accused what they testified, or even that there was an investigation. Prosecutors and the police can do much the same, whenever they please, except that they can't prohibit the family members in question from telling the accused about it.
> And then lifestream those confession videos to the world as "evidence"
It's true that confessions are rarely broadcast live in "the west", but I'm not clear on how that is relevant to questions of justice.
> The western government do not have much control over their "justice" systems as in, they can not turn on & off cases as they feel
Prosecutorial discretion is very wide in the US. 98% of defendants in federal cases plead guilty without a trial. In US criminal cases that make it to trial, in felony cases, 68% are convicted. (That statistic includes non-federal cases.) Basically if a prosecutor decides to go after you, you are fucked. My friend Aaron committed suicide after being hounded by federal prosecutors for several years and facing decades in prison. His alleged crime was downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.
There are cases, were even i doubt the "lawless china narrative".
Lets take something recent from china for comparisson, the local ccp-officials who in the middle of the night send digging crews to endangered dams to open them and flood the areas downstream - without a warning to the population.
Cause if they warn them - they would be liable for damage compensation. So there seems to be somewhat justice giving system, if cases make it to national awareness. But in this cases, the population of villages and the digging crews brawled on the damn, resulting in incarceration of people who defended there reasonable interests. Its complicated, and i do not think the empire has not eroded away some parts of the justice system of the west.
My question is neutral wrt whether the West is authoritarian. The West supposed to progress in terms of, as the saying goes, 'the rule of law', whereas it is in regression in the Orient.
