“any and all of my country’s actions are beyond criticism because at least we didnt kill them”

The US has killed dozens of times that through social murder.

I'm not saying that Stalin wasn't an autocratic dickhead, but if you're gonna compare him unfavorably to present day US, number of own citizens killed is a bad choice of metric 🤷

Why’s it at +157/-3 after 3hr:

The US stat is so bad you easily believe it when attributed to stereotypical evil regime.

Then you’re reminded that same evil thing is actually something the US is currently doing.

I’m glad we don’t just kill everyone we arrest, I’m glad we’re not ruled by a dictator… still, I wish the average person viewing a meme weren’t able to easily believe something we do was actually done by someone we vaguely recall learning was the worst.

I did some googling out of curiosity, turns out Wikipedia has a whole ass article on it: The US prison rate as of 2021 is 531 per 100000 (peaked in 08 with 755 after a huge spike in the 80s and 90s, I wonder why). In the Soviet Union during the high of the gulag system, it was estimated (by actual historians, not the soviets) to be 714 to 892.

Apartheid South Africa was 851. Saudi Arabia has 200.

Hexbear is leaking.

This comment is excellent.

If your average prison sentence is 10 years, you will have 10x more prisoners than annual arrests/sentences.

It’s the same kind of misleading stat as life expectancy being 30 years in medieval time. If you survived childhood you could easily reach your 60s or later, just like how you can live that long without any serious health interventions today.

I think it's because the meme itself is the wrong way to try to make that argument. Instead of just saying "the US has 22% of the world's aggregate prisoner population and that's a problem", it's making that argument by directly comparing it to a MUCH WORSE regime for that exact violation of rights.

The whataboutisms tend to be bristling at the bad comparisons more than a direct refutation of the underlying point being made. I think complaining about the whataboutisms misses the point of those replies, which is valid.

As the other poster said, why not compare with Scandinavian countries that genuinely do have better justice systems rather than comparing with USSR or CCP which have much worse justice systems?

I hate the US as much as the next person but the meme itself is basically whataboutism.

It's always "if you don't like it, go live in Somalia" and never "if you don't like it, go live in Denmark". It's saying "it could be worse" instead of "it could be better".

There’s something (🤷‍♂️) I don’t get here.

Are you thinking OP is pro-Stalin?

I have a full instance block and it still isn't enough. Every day more braindead tankie takes make it through the filter.

"everything the USSR/CCP/DPRK did wrong is actually capitalist state intelligence propaganda" is so exhausting.

"Capitalism is bad" apparently no longer includes state capitalism or the political capital exploitation of the vanguard class that preceeds it.

Authoritarian state =/= socialism

That doesn't change the fact that US prisons are for-profit. And that corporations have huge lobbying powers. It's why marijuana laws are so harsh and disproportionate to actual heinous crimes. Stoners make a more complacent prisoners to make money off of then psychotic killers.

I'm not a tankie, fuck Stalin, but the stat is correct: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate

I don't know how well we know China's figures, though.