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> Suffering economically will likely lead to far more suffering for various Chinese people, and the end result has a good chance of being a civil war. Is this w
by ardy42 8y ago
> Suffering economically will likely lead to far more suffering for various Chinese people, and the end result has a good chance of being a civil war. Is this worth preventing their influence from growing? Who benefits from it?
All the future citizens of the world, but especially those people living in smaller, more liberal, neighboring countries. My biggest worry with authoritarianism is that is seems we may be reaching a technological tipping point that will make these regimes even harder to replace than in the past [1]. Whatever can be done to prevent that is good in my book, especially since I think it's unlikely that these regimes will be content to limit their influence to their borders.
[1] Nuclear weapons make them impossible to replace militarily, and digital surveillance + secret police may eventually make it impossible for internal change to replace them.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago>All the future citizens of the world, but especially those people living in smaller, more liberal, neighboring countries. My biggest worry with authoritarianism is that is seems we may be reaching a technological tipping point that will make these regimes even harder to replace than in the past So you're worried they'll use their influence to support authoritarian regimes in other countries? Maybe we should stop doing that ourselves before we start playing with Chinese lives.
- simonh 8y agoI worry about this too. Pervasive surveillance and monitoring of communications could make an authoritarian regime super-stable and impossible to reform from within.