The King needed a varying amount of support from lords, one church or another and a developing parliament depending on when in time it was.
And at every step along that journey, it was proclaimed as the best possible way of doing things, ordained by god, etc etc. Not just politics, we actually have the ideal system here.
To be clear, my response was satire. You suggested that the Supreme Court was functionally the same as the CCP politburo on the basis that there is some non-zero amount of politicking in either case. I pointed out that the same was true of Anglo-Saxon England to expose the ridiculousness of the equivalence, but you're ignoring that point and making a new point, utterly unrelated to the previous one (in fairness I would also abandon that position)? Something to the effect of, "Because some Americans and Anglo-Saxons thought their systems were the bees-knees, they must be equally terrible"? Am I getting this right?
The “constitution” isn’t an adjective, and I didn’t mention “freedom”. The US incarceration rates are suboptimal, but China is operating actual concentration camps and sterilizing women based on their ethnicity. In 2020 the US had a record year with respect to brutality against journalists and it still would have been the best year China has had in at least the last 70 years. China still practices slavery in all but name. 60 years ago the CCP was waging genocide against its own people. If “corruption” feels too abstract for you, hopefully those things can provide some context about “where the rubber meets the road”. If you still think these things are on the same level as the US’s problems, we aren’t going to be able to have a productive debate.
So, just to pick one of your accusations there -- forced sterilization in China is a global policy if you have too many kids. It's not ethnically targeted, and until recently, minority populations were allowed to have more kids than Han Chinese.
This is easily verifiable if you talk to anyone from China. Too many kids, you get sterilized, them's the rules (unless you're rich/connected, of course). So why do our media always report cases involving minorities out of context, creating unfortunate assumptions? Who benefits from that?
You'd think the free press would surface the most accurate story, right? Just like the awesome judiciary shouldn't lead to world-leading incarceration rates. This set of gaps is what I'm talking about, not China's sins or virtues.
> This is easily verifiable if you talk to anyone from China.
Is it conceivable that China is not entirely honest with its citizens about its various atrocities? If this seems far-fetched, perhaps we could examine the CCP's track record of disinformation, misinformation, and censorship campaigns against its own populace.
> Mass Birth-Prevention Strategy. China has simultaneously pursued a dual systematic strategy of forcibly sterilizing Uyghur women of childbearing age and interning Uyghur men of child-bearing years, preventing the regenerative capacity of the group and evincing an intent to biologically destroy the group as such. According to Government statistics and directives, including to “carry out family planning sterilization,” “lower fertility levels,” and ”leave no blind spots,” China is carrying out a well-documented, State-funded birth-prevention campaign targeting women of childbearing age in Uyghur-concentrated areas with mass forced sterilization, abortions, and IUD placements. China explicitly admits the purpose of these campaigns is to ensure that Uyghur women are “no longer baby-making machines.”
> Asking a citation for how the one-child (now two child) policy has worked for the last 40 years is pretty telling.
Come now, you're being willfully obtuse. Clearly I was asking for a citation about your claim that it's not ethnically motivated beyond "ask any Chinese citizen".
> I sure am glad we have experts rather than security state propaganda.
Well, you don't trust the media, and you don't trust independent researchers, but you totally trust the Chinese government, so I don't know how we're going to make progress. Seems like we should just agree to disagree.
TL:DR; -- Historically, minorities were allowed to have way more kids on paper and the limits were rarely enforced in fact. Since ~2018 there's equality, via raising Han Chinese limits and applying even enforcement, so it's a change and there's some upset about it, but it's the removal of favoritism rather than the imposition of discriminatory measures. It got to even.
..
As far as who I trust. DC natsec think tanks are absolutely at the bottom of that list on ANY topic, they are guaranteed to be entangled with the military-industrial complex. I trust our actual military more than I do those think tanks. (And the one you chose turns out to be funded by... gulenists??? I did not expect that, frickin wild -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_University_of_America)
On THIS topic -- the hard evidence points towards internment and mandatory patriot camp, which are bad, but no genocide, slavery or any of those other crazy accusations thrown about. This is.. not great but also exactly what the Chinese government says they're doing. They put out press releases saying, "yeah, it's mandatory job training and harmony camp". Western media are the ones throwing unsubstantiated claims around.
They ACTUALLY INCLUDE a Chinese newspaper page that they're selectively and deceptively quoting from. As an image, though, so you can't copy/paste it into Google Translate. The source that THAT THEY ARE USING is a story about a state-run "gig economy for cotton picking" program where people with small farms can work on bigger farms during their downtime, one guy is super stoked that he made 5k RMB ($800) in a month (quite a lot for the third world). They pull ominous-sounding quotes about 'organization' out of this story out of context while implying forced labor, right in front of your face, just banking on you not being able to read Chinese. If you read carefully, there's never even a hard accusation, let alone any evidence. Just lots of innuendo.
So who should I trust? I don't know if or why Sudworth was run out of town, but his track record shows a lot of bias and disregard for the truth. Maybe some zealous local party members made him feel unwelcome, maybe he was pressured by higher-placed people in the party, or maybe he's just making a play for an easy headline. I don't know.
And at every step along that journey, it was proclaimed as the best possible way of doing things, ordained by god, etc etc. Not just politics, we actually have the ideal system here.