Comment by thenaturalist

Murderous dictatorships are enabled by mass surveillance and personal data collection. Especially East Germany, which was obsessed with data harvesting on every individual and installed as many CCTV cameras as its budget and tech would allow. East Germany would be creaming itself over the panopticon we are walking into.

> Meanwhile we put experts to work optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. A truly enlightened way of life we've built for ourselves.

I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and claims like this really bother me. As if it is somehow comparable to being forced to serve in the army of a dictatorship. What is wrong with working on optimizing conversion and engagement metrics? It can be interesting and useful. People are not forced to do it. It is just one of many jobs that one can do in a free society.

I believe that one of the reasons why authoritarianism seems to be on the rise in the US and around the world in general is that it has somehow become fashionable to belittle and disparage what we have in the West... and how good it is, despite its imperfections. I fear that we will only realize this once we have lost it.

Conversion metrics = people find what they want to buy quicker and more efficiently, allowing them to spend time on leisure that would otherwise have been spent on gathering needed goods.

Engagement metrics = making entertainment that's popular rather than what's mandated by the state's culture committees.

Optimizing them is a virtuous and noble profession.

Do we? I’d say it’s pretty close, especially if you include every time that someone shrieks ‘that’s socialism,’ or ‘that’s communism’ every time any social programme is proposed.

Eg: Shall we improve public healthcare?

I read a quote somewhere that said democracy does nothing to promote good leadership. The point of democracy isn't to elect a good government, the point is to quickly get rid of a bad government

The ruler is not "avoiding" elections due to war, he is prohibited by the constitution to hold them during wartime (not to mention the feasibility of letting the inhabitants of occupied regions to exercise their voting rights). So it is not a dictatorship in any sense.

Does Singapore force people to be bus drivers?

There have been such dictators in the past. Singapore is one example. Arguably the British Empire was libertarian by the standards of its time (and empires).

Perhaps the least recognized example is America. The Constitution imposes libertarianism on the population against majority will. You can't change the constitution with a 50%+1 vote, so it forces freedom of speech and other rights on people who might otherwise easily vote to get rid of them. There's no one man enforcing the constitution, just a general agreement to obey SCOTUS.

>What I find confusing about this comment is that to me, authoritarian and libertarian are opposites, but have only to do with individual freedoms, not the political system.

"Do whatever the F you want as long as you don't challenge the state" isn't that incompatible at first glance and might work ok if you have a low touch state. Where it gets obviously incompatible is when you have eastern european style oligarchs and western style administrative state and state favored businesses and industries that leverage state violence to stifle competition.

I don't think it's possible to have an authoritarian government in a modern society that doesn't trend in one of those directions.

Yes and no.

They all have a very solid industrial base, like 30% to 50% of the economy, with ~50% of workers living abroad (not fully part of the welfare state). Comparatively high R&D. Low taxes.

And plain tax evasion is now illegal, but those countries are still an important stop to hide money elsewhere.

But the main secret sauce is a flexible fast legal system. Stability, low crime, and less gridlock in the legislature when the need for change is realized.

1) Not sneering at it but everything has a cost. If authoritarians get the impression that all their past offenses will be forgiven if they hold everyone hostage and negotiate well, then there's no risk for them. And it's disrespectful to the victims.

There should be things you don't come back from.

For example, if you imprison people for political reasons, the time they spent in prison should be added up, multiplied by a punitive constant (2-3) and given to the offenders. And if that is a just punishment (I believe it it), then not doing that to them is unjust. Simple as that.

2) We should be looking for ways how to have both a peaceful transition and just punishment for the offenders.

Look at Unit 731 as an example ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 ).

The people most responsible got away for free by skillful negotiation (immunity in exchange for data).

Instead, the proposition should have been a) you give us the data and graciously accept your death penalty b) we repeat the experiments on you, nonlethal first. That's harsh and will make many people today recoil (because they've been indoctrinated into a 1-step moral system which seems to correlate with stability but injustice), but it's fair and just. They think those experiments were OK to perform on innocent people, so they are very much OK to perform on them (guilty people) by their own logic.

Yes, here in Poland 36 years later people still seriously argue the country would be much better if we hanged the communists off lampposts (like it was done in few other places).

There ws a great cost to a "peaceful transition". The entire judiciary was basically full of extremely corrupt people, half of the political class. Even today when the old judges are almost all gone the horrible culture they had still corrupts many younger ones (although today it is more towards incompetence and indifference rather than corruption).

Would it be better to have half a million (or possibly entire million if you count inevitable victims on the other side) die to avoid it? We are still paying the price.

There is an argument that had we sorted the communist problem successfully back then we wouldn't have politicians later that let themselves be corrupted by Putin into funding his army. And perhaps there would never be an invasion of Ukraine.

Or if we done away with the peaceful transition, the communists in other neighbouring countries would attempt to hold on to power with everything they got. Who knows.

You need "a little bit" of politician/judge/enforcer lynching to keep the government in line the same way they make a big show of "a little bit" of kicking in people's doors at 4am to keep the peasants in line.

I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?

Obviously, if you intend to abduct ("imprison") or kill ("execute") somebody as punishment, then you should have very high certainty they deserve that punishment. One of the methods of achieving that is giving them a chance to defend themselves ("court process").

I don't see any difference between individuals and monopolies on violence ("states") doing this, as long as they both have sufficient levels of certainty.

It's a hard one. I can tell you something which doesn't work because the Americans have tried it twice so far. It won't work to say "Well, that was naughty, please don't do it again".

That silliness is how you get Jim Crow, it's how you got Trump 2.0

In a civilized country I can believe jail time would be good enough, but the US still uses capital punishment, so seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously some of those responsible have to be executed

In practice I remain doubtful that such an orderly transfer is likely. If there's chaos, for even a few days, that's how you get France's "Wild Purge" in the period when German withdrawal and Allied liberation are happening one town at a time. The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process.