Solely Julian Assange's case would demonstrate the disparity. In the Angloamerican countries - including the US - there's all that talk of freedom as long as you don't actually make use of it. If you use it in a way that threatens the incumbent interests, the results are much worse than some minor jail time.
Occupy protesters were kicked on the ground, hauled to courts and hooked up with tens of thousands of dollars of fines for 'trespassing' on !public! property. Effectively bankrupting many, and discouraging protest for good. Since the state did not persecute them for their speech, but for 'trespassing', all is still 'democratic' in the legalese. Even if its not in practice.
I’ve lived in the US for 14 years, and I’m all too familiar with the problems we have in this country. I also spent three years in Hong Kong (my mother is from there, and I speak Cantonese), living through the transition period that the new security law brought on. I moved back to the US last year. In the context of liberty and freedom of expression, the situation in the US is simply not comparable to the one in Hong Kong. Despite all its issues, I would pick the US as my home any day of the week.
I have friends in Hong Kong who fear what they post on social media will land them in jail. That was not the case pre-2020.
Can you find many individual instances of injustice in any given democracy? Sure. But you don’t seem to grasp the difference in severity and scale. There were over 10000 protestors arrested in Hong Kong in 2020 alone, out of a population of 7.5 million. None of the examples you picked are analogous to entire newspapers getting shut down and politicians getting sentenced to jail en masse.
I glanced at the latest amendments to the UK bill and it includes such ridiculousnesses as the possibility of 1 year imprisonment for stealing a traffic sign, and the right for police to search your person for carrying a lock.
Your original comment is still textbook whataboutism, however, and deserves its downvotes for that reason alone.
There is no problem with 'whataboutism'. Entire Angloamerican common law is based on whataboutism. Based on precedents and prior tradition.
Especially in such cases of moral, ethical or civil comparison, 'what about' is a fundamental question to ask in order to establish a logical and neutral framework. Otherwise all comparisons become meaningless and all the accusations that are levied on that framework become plain old which hunt and smears.
As in this case - Occupy protesters were beaten on the ground and hooked up with tens of thousands of dollars of fines in 2011, through an FBI-coordinated crackdown campaign that encompassed 30+ cities in the US, but hey - the US is still 'somehow' democratic. And still lectures and even smears everyone else about democracy.
Leave aside persecuting a foreign journalist for exposing its war crimes - along with its satellite UK, supposedly a beacon of freedom and democracy. Which went so far as to just violate its own laws to extradite Assange, based on the 'opinion' of the judge who 'just' found it 'okay'.
Moral, ethical comparisons require an objective framework. If one doesnt provide that, people challenge it by asking 'what about'.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/no...
Occupy protesters were kicked on the ground, hauled to courts and hooked up with tens of thousands of dollars of fines for 'trespassing' on !public! property. Effectively bankrupting many, and discouraging protest for good. Since the state did not persecute them for their speech, but for 'trespassing', all is still 'democratic' in the legalese. Even if its not in practice.