Liberals construct their whole identity as opposition to the supposed authoritarian menace of countries like China, claiming that what differentiates us is that that we have the right to speak and to question the system. But as soon as someone actually does that, the mask falls off. You won’t get a real argument in return, instead you get mobbed by panicked accusations that you’re sowing division or speaking for some foreign power. The latter is particularly hilarious on a tiny community like Lemmy. It’s as if the only conceivable reason to be dissatisfied with what you see happening around you is that a hidden force has corrupted your mind.

In a place like China, the state has official mechanisms for social control. Here, the liberal system gets its order from the mob moral panic, concern trolling about public safety and social cohesion, and etc. And that rhetoric is used as cover for a wholesale purge of any dissent. Say the system isn’t working, and the standard response is to stop debating the policy and start attacking the dissenter. People will dig through your post history to brand you as a bad actor, and try to banish you from the sphere of civil discourse. It’s a soft power version of the very social credit systems liberals claim to despise, enforced by trolls in mortal fear of losing their tenuous moral standing. These people try to place themselves as moral censors, and what they really want is a society that appears free, but one where anybody with a conflicting opinion gets mobbed. There's a deep irony that these same people see themselves as champions of freedom of expression.

edit: amusingly this whole post itself serves as an example of what I'm talking about, immediate mobbing by the libs to shut down discussion, and slurs thrown my way, this is the freedom of speech liberals believe in