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It doesn't take omniscience or omnipotence or a limitless supply of extraordinary employees to effect severe oppression. North Korea exists. The KGB, now called
by themacguffinman 5y ago
It doesn't take omniscience or omnipotence or a limitless supply of extraordinary employees to effect severe oppression. North Korea exists. The KGB, now called the FSB, exists. The Great Firewall exists. Xinjiang internment camps exist. Operation Fox Hunt exists. WeChat & Douyin censorship exists. The Gestapo used to exist. American government-enforced chattel slavery used to exist. American Japanese internment camps used to exist.
So tell me, how do you get there from "my local American DMV can barely fill out a form correctly"? Because it happened. And it will continue happening if we forget history.
- ethbr0 5y agoSevere oppression wasn't the the topic of the comment I was replying to. It was regarding unreasonable fantasies of competence in government oppression. You can construct an oppressive regime simply by dedicating enough people to it, but they still can't exceed the fundamental ceiling of wage:job_tenure:performance. Consequently, every example you mentioned routinely failed. In aggregate they accomplished oppression, but emotional pleas about "forgetting history" don't change the fact that we're talking about bureaucracies. And bureaucracies only ever approach a semblance of competency via brute force, either in resources or manpower.