Imagine being so mad at a speech you want to imprison someone. Isn’t this a sign of mental illness?
I denigrate myself all the time with humor. This is my strategy to keeping an open mind on self improvement.
However, Americans do it all the time, not because they're exceptionally lazy or mentally ill, but because the driving infrastructure is so exceptionally good that there's no reason not to use it. Driving is just what you do every day, without much thinking, instead of something that must be deliberately planned and executed.
(Whether that's a net plus to America as a whole is, of course, a different question altogether.)
There is a drama now happening on Youtube with former presitator of Kazakhstan, where his past subordinates now surface and dump their personal accounts of him.
As could've been imagined, none are positive of his personal ability. But the biggest insecurity of such people is to appear to be useless.
He very much understands that he surrounded himself with sharks, and able lieutenants while being on the borderline of mental development scale himself.
In many dumped secret recordings of him by one former official, he often explodes with "You would've been nobody without me!!!" whenever challenged with even an innuendo of "I could've done it without you."
What holds such people firmly in their chairs of power, is not their ability, but such shark pool of capable executors whose loyalty is conditional
president + dictator?
I remember some proclaiming that his resignation was nothing but an act...
No way to explain all of his personal appointees losing posts one, after another.
If Jack Ma can speak up, what's to stop the next richest guy from speaking up? It's dissent all the way down. You need to nip it in the bud.
Furthermore, if the fortune of a billion people rests on your authority, virtually all ends justify the means.
Acting as if these horrific, nebulous governing systems can be reduced to the image of a Saturday-morning cartoon villain, an infantile mustache-twirler angrily shaking his fist at the TV screen.
It is not “offense”. A system does not get “get mad”. It constantly sniffs for the slightest hint of dissent, any figure that might even come close to nudging public opinion the wrong way, and grinds it to dust.
It’s no different from every other country’s power-seeking and preserving systems, just with a much more sensitive trigger-finger, and that seemingly excessive sensitivity and reactivity is simply because they can. Not because some CCP higher-up has a fragile ego.
Chalk it up to systemic casualties all you'd like, but let's not pretend as if that isn't reductive as well. Behind every system, there are decisions being made by human beings and it's not flippant to be cognizant of that.
It blinds people to the realities of power dynamics that still exist today and have not been at all lessened or subdued by progressivism one bit.
In a single-party system, you can't allow dissent or you will end up with multiple parties, if enough of the dissenters agree with each other.
When someone speaks against the government in China, particularly someone with a high profile like Jack Ma, the government is worried that other people might agree with him, and they might form a movement that demands change and challenges the party's policies.
If the party allows this to happen, that would mean they recognize the legitimacy of political action originating outside of the party. That would be an existential threat to the single-party system.
(Also, the last time the party allowed public dissent, it grew out of control and turned into the Tiananmen Square protests. The party's current leaders remember that time well, and the lesson they took from it is that allowing dissent was a serious miscalculation.)
I imagine that the horrors of such violence would weigh heavily on the mindset of scared decision makers.
Maybe it all comes down to fear. Fear of death during an uprising, for one.
Therefore you reduce this situation to “he said bad thing, therefore he got jailed, therefore whoever jailed him is a bad thing”
Repeat, amplify, and you got yourself a brainwash