(via CNN)

It’s the mark of great leadership when you dole out a $2 million fine, cost someone their job, and prohibit the entertainment group he works for from putting on shows until further notice just because they made a passing comment about your standing military, right?

The above ironic observation is harsher than the comment that Chinese comedian “Boat” Li Haoshi made while performing in Beijing for a performance for the Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media, a entertainment firm responsible for many public stand-up comedy performance in China. Essentially, he compared China’s current army and their capabilities to two stray dogs he adopted chasing a squirrel. Reportedly, Haoshi didn’t go any further than that in his “roast” of the People’s Liberation Army, directly chaired by President Xi Jinping. Yet, Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media and Li Haoshi were fined $2 million for breaking a law passed last year that made any sort of slander against the Chinese military blasphemous and illegal.

While it seems to be a pretty insane, childish, and totalitarian response to a rather innocuous joke, this shouldn’t come as a total surprise since Xi Jinping has ascended to power and, in years past, banned mentions of Winnie the Pooh in comparison to him. This is just the latest step in stamping out freedom of expression and getting closer to a real life version of Orwell’s 1984.

If you give such a small insult (if you can even call it that?) such credence, one could argue that you just gave the joke more power and truth than just letting it be. We can only hope that an era of blistering comedy from and about Xi and modern day China is bubbling under the surface only waiting to explode because Xi is obsessed with projecting strength, even more so than America, or the most toxic of straight men.