The USA is also an authoritarian State, it just has better marketing.

I live in Taiwan. I'm no fan of the CPC. But if you zoom out a bit, it's kinda hard to distinguish the two beyond Americans winning global cultural victory (CPC propaganda is still goofy and obvious).

Point at tiananmem square, an atrocious massacre of their own citizenry. The USA has done this - it has locked its citizens in concentration camps, supported their enslavement and recaptured the ones that managed to free themselves, bombed wealthy neighborhoods of the wrong race, had soldiers fire upon striking workers and peaceful protesters. America just has no Tank Man photo and much more subtle media relations - ostensibly free media but in reality controlled through the mutual interests of the billionaire owners of the media conglomerates and the multi millionaire politicians.

The CPC did a genocide in Xinjiang. They were very good at information control here, it's almost impossible to find even an image from the inside of one of their concentration camps. The USA funded a genocide in Palestine, but it can maintain a sort of non culpability. At any point in time the USA can turn on its Israeli allies, and my cynical expectation is that when the government becomes flagrantly fascist enough they'll just blame the Jews and call it done. But, until now, they've maintained an extraordinarily effective marketing campaign propping up Israel as a bastion of freedom and democracy in a demonic environment,values it's managed to market across the entire world that isn't the PRC or cuba or Venezuela, to where people in other countries will say "I can do what I want, it's a free country" even in countries where that really isn't the case e.g. for speech in the UK for example. In actuality it's a more racialized pitch - the Israelis are more credibly white, the Muslims are, well, Muslims. Or Brown. Whichever. But they have this massive marketing apparatus (decades of film and TV) smoothing over these racialized concepts into "freedom and democracy vs savagery and chaos," whereas the CPC with their racialized version just had Han and Normal vs Muslim and Kinda Weird (maybe dangerous!). A much more despicable pitch on the surface which is why they didn't get away with a televised genocide the way America and Israel got away with decades of apartheid against Palestine.

Anyway in summary if we take a look at all the bad the CPC vs the USA have done in their lifetimes, idk man at best the scales at balanced, worse case I think America has been worse for the world overall. I would be curious if people that disagree would be willing to do so with the context of American imperialism in mind - interfering in south America and the middle East for example. Is it still better than a country that has one imperialist action (Tibet) and a genocide under its belt?

When did the concept of "a free country" arise, and what did it mean? It seems to have been in use in the 1600s. Here it is in a tract written, apparently, around 1689 in England:

https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-tract-su...

The freedoms in that instance are freedom of religion, and democracy. (Democracy, the franchise, was limited to about 10% of men, under rules that varied locally from "you have to own a house" to "you have to own the entire region".)

But here the concept is again in ancient times:

https://archive.org/details/BiblicalCollectionPrintedBetween...

This is (a translation of) Josephus, writing in the first century about a speech by a Roman senator from the time when Claudius was put on the throne, with lines like "our natural freedom", "breath of liberty", and "the Liberty of former Times, that was dead and gone before ever I came into the World ..." I can't work out what that freedom was all about - Claudius came after Caligula, though, so you can make a good guess - but evidently this kind of concept is much older than the United States.

I also found the phrase "it's a free country" in Uncle Tom's Cabin, where the freedom in question is the freedom to control slaves.

So the concept is:

• Not modern,

• Not well defined,

• But not meaningless, either.

I'll start by recommending you look up whataboutism, and learn about why it's a fallacious form of argumentation. There's definitely a non-fallacious way of making your argument, but that's your job.

I also don't think your assessment of the relative histories is reliable, but for our purposes here, that's all largely beside the point, because the degree of national security alignment of domestic companies in China compared to the United States are at completely different orders of magnitude, which is the pertinent issue when considering harm reduction here.

I guess the US have a kind of Tank Man photo. The girl from Vietnam.

About media. For me, since Trump second term, I just can't watch Superhero movies (DC / Marvel). It just feels strange and wrong for me. Also movies like the Den of Thieves (1), the feel just plain wrong with a brutal police.

This is your annual reminder that white Muslims do in fact exist.