I've been hearing a lot of the other side since I came to Vietnam. Maybe it's just a Southern thing but most of the people I've talked to here tell me privately that they wish they had a Western-style democratic government. I think they probably see Western government through rose-colored glasses but the fact remains that saying the wrong thing about the wrong people can land you in jail here.
> I think they probably see Western government through rose-colored glasses but the fact remains that saying the wrong thing about the wrong people can land you in jail here.
It may be worth pointing out that legal justice is really a post facto affair. The question is not whether bad things sometimes happen in the US, but how the legal system reacts to it after the fact.
In both the cases you've cited, the book is far from closed on the incidents. It's hardly even opened.
To establish anecdotal evidence of real injustice, you need to cite cases where the legal system failed to provide any sort of redress. Which with more effort you certainly could; I'm not claiming otherwise, nor am I claiming that you can't build a more comprehensive fact-based case against the US on some grounds. My point is simply that the implicit standard you are using by citing two things that haven't been through the system can't be used to score points for or against the system yet. The question is less "can you be put in jail" than "can you be kept in jail", and the corresponding second-order effects that has on society.
I am not entirely satisfied with the US; I am simultaneously not aware of any place that strikes me as obviously better, or even obviously on a better long-term trajectory. (Some places are better in some ways but end up being worse than others.)
I've seen some pretty outrageous things said about Barack Obama, the current President, in public, and the people who have said those things are free to say them another day. Similarly, I heard a lot of people say very outrageous things about George W. Bush, the previous president, and those people are still free to urge other people to agree with them in decrying that president. I lived during my twenties for three years in an actual dictatorship (which has since democratized). The situation here in the United States, as bad as it has recently been, is nothing at all like the situation in Russia today, or indeed like Russia any time in my lifetime. I know plenty of Russian (and Chinese) immigrants who didn't learn to breathe easily about expressing opinions about the government until they had been here quite a while.
Come on, Vietnam isn't measured the same way as Russia and China, which was the topic of conversation. That's the other side I was talking about, not US vs. non-US, or democracy vs. non(?)-democracy, or habeas corpus, or etc. Read the article, "the other side" is specifically referring to a country large enough to acquire a mythology of punishing existence as well as economic power that the US has to pay attention.
To me Vietnam is largely "of a sort" with China. Certainly not as developed economically but politically not so dissimilar. Your brief comment didn't seem to me to be making finer distinctions.
