Another NatSec day – seditious sheep and soy milk

I sometimes wonder if we can go 24 hours without at least one absurd/creepy NatSec horror. It never seems to happen. Today, we have two.

It says here…

Three more members of a speech therapists’ union have been charged and remanded, over children’s books featuring talking sheep that prosecutors say are seditious.

I think it’s the books, rather than the actual cartoon sheep, that allegedly…

…bring hatred, contempt or disaffection against the government and the administration of justice, to incite people to commit violence and to ‘counsel disobedience’ of the law.

But maybe it’s the animated wooly ruminants. Either way, it’s so borderline self-parody that even the most devout CCP loyalist among the Justice Dept’s prosecutors must find it embarrassing. Maybe the idea is to test their willingness to debase themselves.

Second, we learn that…

Vitasoy is [reportedly] planning to collect personal information on its workers and their family members, including employment history and membership of various associations… 

This is presumably aimed at weeding out any staff at the soy milk maker who might stab a cop and then kill themselves, or express sympathy to the family of a colleague who does so.

Is such a tragedy involving a company employee likely to occur again? Will a background check on staff members’ and their families’ affiliations help to prevent such a thing? And how does Vitasoy enforce this? Let’s say the company’s deputy assistant accounting manager’s husband is a member of the speech therapists’ union – how do they force her to admit it? And what action will Vitasoy take if she does come clean about it?

The family-run company has supposedly hurt the feelings of Mainlanders by blaming them – ’not its own misdeeds’ – for a fall in profits. The management is petrified about being in the CCP’s Big Book of Enemies, and desperately needs to do a public kowtow. A corporate version of political screening might do the trick. Watch more companies follow suit.

And Hongkongers are once again talking about boycotting their most venerable brand of soy milk. (Am I the only person who remembers the mint-choc flavour Vitasoy? It was amazing. In its absence, I can probably live without the company’s products.)

We also have the raiding of a movie screening on rather selective Covid grounds. 

Coming next: the makers of the dystopia-come-true film Ten Years release a previously unseen sixth vignette about speech therapists being rounded up for subversive cartoon sheep, explaining that it was cut from the 2015 production as too ridiculous.