Actually, no, you've gone and pissed me off. Congratulations. So there's this guy named
Liu Xiaobo. Maybe you've heard of him because he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
On 8 December 2008, Liu was detained because of his participation with the Charter 08 manifesto. He was formally arrested on 23 June 2009 on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power".[6][7] He was tried on the same charges on 23 December 2009,[8] and sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment and two years' deprivation of political rights on 25 December 2009.
Now because you're inevitably going to try and justify your position and fit this into your existing worldview instead of critically examining either, you're probably going to want to draw some comparison between him and Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, or Bradley Manning. Let me stop you right there, because all three of those people either illegally acquired sensitive government information or illegally distributed it. They actually broke laws, and in the case of the latter two, deliberately set out to do so and to betray the oaths they had supposedly taken. Their activities are not covered under reasonable definitions of freedom of speech. In fact, for at least the latter two, you could make a reasonable accusation of espionage and sedition. Snowden and Assange also fled from justice, which puts paid their supposed "noble" deeds, since neither is willing to accept responsibility for their actions. (Protip: rule of law means no one is above the law, even if the law is bad, wrong, or corrupt.)
Liu Xiaobo wrote a
political treatise advocating for peaceful government reform, which is covered under any reasonable definition of free speech, and got 11 years in jail. Recent examples of similar if not far more provocative actions in the United States would be perhaps
Cliven Bundy drawing several hundred armed militants to assist him in threatening Bureau of Land Management personnel trying to remove his illegally grazing cattle, and
Ted Nugent implicitly threatening to assassinate President Barack Obama. Both Bundy and Nugent are free men. I notice Alex Salmond is also still free in the United Kingdom despite actively leading a political party trying to end a 300+ year old political union that would, among other things, deprive the British Ministry of Defence of its only nuclear basing location. I notice Jean-Marie Le Pen is still free in France despite literally being a fascist. (These are of course, individual examples of non-persecution; please, do identify for me the equivalent of the Tibetans and Uighurs in the West. Go ahead. I'll wait. The best you can reasonably point at in modern times is the Roma.)
There are, of course, about a thousand other examples I could make, such as the difference between the handling of say, the Tiananmen Square protests and Occupy Wall Street, but I'll just settle for saying that you have no idea how good you have it in comparison to people in actual totalitarian states, that if you were in one you'd probably have already been selected for reeducation, and your flippant commentary diminishes and makes light of people who actually exist and actually suffer under iron-fisted regimes.
We lost some freedoms and they gained a few. Now we're one big global pool of expendable human resource.
