Try to get through Chinese immigration wearing a T-shirt that says "Tienanmen Square 1989" or "Free Tibet" and I'll bet you will find that they care quite a lot.
Try to get through Chinese immigration wearing a T-shirt that says "Tienanmen Square 1989" or "Free Tibet" and I'll bet you will find that they care quite a lot.
It's almost certain that there are other things like this going on right now. We just haven't heard about them yet. In other words, within our lifetimes we will almost certainly learn, "In 2024, they did..." and we're not aware of it now.
> if a young actress had accused him in 2010, for example, she would have been suppressed
She probably would have worsened her career prospects, which I agree is horrific. It's a testament of how the entertainment industry reinforces patriarchal norms. But it is a far cry from actual suppression. Personalities like David Icke have been lobbing accusations around about the Royal Family for years, publishing books and giving talks. As far as I'm aware he hasn't been imprisioned or censored in the UK for any of that. He's been banned from countries for denying the Holocaust and spreading COVID misinformation, but neither of these are cases of stating well-established facts.
If after November, the powers that be decide that "Donald Trump lost the 2020 election" is no longer allowed speech, you're screwed. Especially if you wear it on a T-shirt.
Are you talking about this kind of thing? https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Depends how you "use" it, surely. Using it to claim that black people are inherently more violent, or to justify police crackdowns on black neighbourhoods is still racist and is not supported by the fact in itself.
As the common wisdom goes: Al Capone was not arrested for being a crime boss but for tax evasion. Why bother setting clear boundaries on what behavior is or isn't anti-revolutionary if you can just make sure everyone already violates the law based on technicalities and then just decide who you want to arrest for it as necessary?
If anything "spy on your neighbor" plays into what I said: you not only need to worry about getting on the bad side of the authority (i.e. those able to enforce the law against you) but of literally anyone else who might have it out for you. The legal basis for arresting people is just legalistic window dressing to create a pretense of law and justice.
This is, by the way, the biggest practical distinction between the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: in peak Nazi Germany the police would just drag you off the street and throw you in a hole or shoot you for treason, in the Soviet Union the police would disappear you into a gulag but only after giving you an unwinnable mock trial where you would be put on record to confess (after torture if necessary or desired) to your treasonous counter-revolutionary beliefs. Because one followed purely from "might makes right" and the other tried to maintain a pretense of ideological principles and justice. Not that this mattered much to those on the receiving end - you'd still end up dead or imprisoned.