> If I want to talk politics, I do it with my friends over a beer.

As a former Soviet citizen, this is particularly funny to me. Where the safest place for political discussion was at home, in the kitchen, with vodka and couple of good friends. It was part of Soviet culture back then.

Even then you could still end up in the gulag. My wife's great grandfather spent years in work camps because his drinking "friends" turned him in for expressing "unfavourable opinions about Stalin".

While not anywhere nearly that extreme, it makes me nervous that we're moving in that direction culturally (where it's socially acceptable and encouraged to turn someone in for having the "wrong" thoughts).

Victorians in Australia have been arrested for contemplating protest, and some of those originated from via "tips." It's not a giant leap.

This is in no way an endorsement of the Soviet Union but it does need to be noted that the Soviet Union was in most parts of it's history, far more moderate than the Soviet Union under Stalin, Stalin has a higher body count than Hitler. Now in saying that, the Soviet Union was never a bastion of enlightenment era liberalism, free thought or personal freedoms. I agree it's not a end goal we should be striving for.

Interestingly the same could've been said for China post-Deng, pre-Pooh.