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@pluralistic i used to watch a lot of SerpentZA—a South African Brit who had emigrated to China—and one of the things he pointed out was that basically everything was illegal, but it was rarely enforced. Only if you were “annoying” would they throw the book at you.

But if everyone is always breaking the law, they have the legal pretense to arrest anyone they want at any time—that kind of arbitrary violence is the crux of authoritarianism.

@pluralistic I've long worried that this tactic would be used against ordinary citizens too, just with different laws being selectively enforced. Frankly, copyright law as it stands is ideal for this purpose: penalties far, FAR out of proportion to the harms, and widespread flouting of it by ordinary people.

@pluralistic This was in fact a standard modus operandi of the communist regime here (former Czechoslovakia): make it very difficult to lead a good life without breaking a law. Now you can mount a valid prosecution against anybody who's causing trouble. Tangentially, this is why stuff that a lot of people do and think legitimate (e.g. smoking weed) should usually not be felonies: selective enforcement gives the police/state too much power.

@pluralistic

People forget about the execution vans. It's wild how little criticism there is of China from people who claim to believe in human rights. Even on the brutalization of Hong Kong, which we all watched happen live, now you look it upon Youtube and all the results hold the pro-regime narrative.

That silence is why I think China represents the single biggest threat to democracy. The fall of the US has everyone's attention, but the CCP already quietly disappeared up a million people.