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> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas

> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12] > Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International. People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was. Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.

martin-t 9mo ago
Dustpile of history, sure, but gallows first. Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable. Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".
- lukan 9mo ago
  Hm. I am not sure if a lynchmob and more blood would have helped the transition. The main important thing to the people was, that the wall was down and Stasi (secret police) out of power. There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
  - tialaramex 9mo ago
    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.
    - martin-t 9mo ago
      > The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process. I also don't like this but I wonder, if this is because the choice is between a) full punishment with less certainty of guilt now b) lenient or no punishment with high certainty of built later. The ideal would be to hold those people until they can be tried and punished in an orderly fashion. And in principle all you need for this is enough food to keep them alive, though in such situations, even that might be a luxury.
  - martin-t 9mo ago
    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.
    - potato3732842 9mo ago
      >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. This peasant is faulty. He's not indoctrinated enough. Someone nab him and send him for reeducation. /s
    - lukan 9mo ago
      "I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?" Maybe because of your language? "Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable."
      - martin-t 9mo ago
        Because the optimum is a public process which proves their guilt beyond reasonable doubt so that every good person supports their punishment and has the confidence (certainty of guilt) to support it publicly. But if the choice is between no punishment and somebody gunning them down in the street or droning them, i prefer the latter. Court processes are useful when guilt is uncertain at first look and you want to increase certainty. But dictators and their close supporters, the certainty is often sufficient by nature of many their actions being public. Sometimes they literally go on TV and declare they're going to a foreign country to kill their people and take their land. At that point, it only becomes a matter of making sure you have the right person. And don't forget the victims. Many authoritarian regimes don't kill opposition outright (for various reasons) but imprison them instead. Such a victim knows many of the people (cops, judges, informants, etc.) responsible for / guilty of falsely imprisoning them. After a regime change, the victims go free and have often more knowledge of the offenses than can be proven to a court by the simply virtue of being there and therefore have more than enough confidence to deliver a just punishment.
  - potato3732842 9mo ago
    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.
- thomassmith65 9mo ago
  A peaceful transition of power is nothing to sneer at. After a revolutionary change, they are rare.
  - martin-t 9mo ago
    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 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.
  - Roark66 9mo ago
    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.
nephihaha 9mo ago
The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.
- tim333 9mo ago
  People go on about surveillance but it's not really the problem compared to murderous dictatorships.
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    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.
    - tim333 9mo ago
      Yeah but there's lots of surveillance like stuff that goes on without turning into murderous dictatorships. In England where I live we have cctv all over the place and on the internet Google knows most of my stuff but neither really worry me - we haven't really had a dictatorship setup since 1215 or so.
      - nephihaha 9mo ago
        1215? Try Cromwell, or numerous dubious monarchs. The Tudors murdered 10% of the English population, I believe. Other monarchs have usurped the throne and most people never had the vote until Victorian times and after. Then you have the beginnings of an attempted coup against Harold Wilson and Blair using the so called Criminal Justice Bills to force things through. Lockdown demonstrated their powers well. Even Private Eye which poses as a dissident voice towed that line. The UK is certainly not the paradise it thinks it is. Northern Ireland was pretty oppressive throughout much of my lifetime, and the state authorities were part of that along with the paramilitaries. The British state has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to undermine Scottish and Welsh nationalism, including people dying under mysterious circumstances, manufactured political scandals and agents provocateurs. Some declassified information details the effort put into derailing the Scottish independence movement in the sixties and seventies (and even the devolution movement). If you are in England, then agents provocateurs have been common in the environmentalist movement, the far left & far right etc. The Socialist Workers Party has to be one of the most obviously infiltrated groups out there or it certainly looks like it. The state has also tried to make the campaign against Digital ID look ridiculous by linking it to Flat Earth and chemtrail agents provocateurs, even though hostility to it is much more widespread and serious.
mothballed 9mo ago
Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points. It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago
  That makes sense to me. Authoritarian government is not inherently abusive of citizens, even though it often gets used in rhetoric as though that was the case. It's just that there are no guard rails against the whims of the people in charge, so you better hope you manage to keep good people in charge forever (and that is obviously not going to happen).
  - KiwiJohnno 9mo ago
    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
    - account42 9mo ago
      The multi-year terms still lets bad governments do a lot of damage though, and they have to be pretty bad to actually be removed for good. Perhaps it would be better to pick the government at random and then have much more frequent votes with the only choice being whether to pick a new random government or not.
- jasonwatkinspdx 9mo ago
  If you're a bus driver in Singapore denied the right to protest, strike, and otherwise organize for better pay and conditions, you might feel a bit different about how free Singapore is economically.
coldtea 9mo ago
>People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  We hear far more about the precursor than the GDR, don't we? (Actually its immediate precursor was Allied Occupied Germany with the GDR being the Soviet zone.)
  - lostlogin 9mo ago
    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?
    - jen20 9mo ago
      > especially if you include every time that someone shrieks ‘that’s socialism,’ or ‘that’s communism’ But... why would you include that? They're certainly not discussions of the DDR.
      - nephihaha 9mo ago
        We do have socialised medicine where I live and it is falling apart TBH. Never hear it compared to East Germany.
    - nephihaha 9mo ago
      By "we", I didn't mean Americans, but weaterners. We have the National Health Service where I live and it is a complete mess (I know someone who waited over seven years for a jaw operation, another who has several years to wait for autism screening). I don't want the American system, and the basic principle of the NHS is good but still.... This AI slop is a pretty accurate description of my local medical practice (bar the cheap joke at beginning and everyone having an English accent): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3U25wNyVRw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3U25wNyVRw We hardly ever hear about East Germany or all the horrors of living in such a place. Very rarely these days. I've known quite a few people who lived under that regime and they told me what it was like. Everyone was being watched, and even school children had to write spy reports on their neighbours. All while the East German state kept proclaiming how it was a place of freedom and equality.
solarexplorer 9mo ago
> Propane gas tanks became registered products I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left. Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them... This was in the late 80s.
- lostlogin 9mo ago
  Oh wow. At that point, just make everything a registered item.
Terr_ 9mo ago
The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled [0] was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient. Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues. [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/
- petre 9mo ago
  > Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony A security circus and a waste of time. Look at the Korean People's Army. Their main areas of expertise are marching in synchrony, digging trenches, construction and agriculture.
- fc417fc802 9mo ago
  Meanwhile we put experts to work optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. A truly enlightened way of life we've built for ourselves.
  - honzabe 9mo ago
    > 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.
    - 9mo ago

martin-t 9mo ago

Dustpile of history, sure, but gallows first. Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable. Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".

lukan 9mo ago
Hm. I am not sure if a lynchmob and more blood would have helped the transition. The main important thing to the people was, that the wall was down and Stasi (secret police) out of power. There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
- tialaramex 9mo ago
  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.
  - martin-t 9mo ago
    > The accused are punished, sometimes even executed, without anything resembling due process. I also don't like this but I wonder, if this is because the choice is between a) full punishment with less certainty of guilt now b) lenient or no punishment with high certainty of built later. The ideal would be to hold those people until they can be tried and punished in an orderly fashion. And in principle all you need for this is enough food to keep them alive, though in such situations, even that might be a luxury.
- martin-t 9mo ago
  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.
  - potato3732842 9mo ago
    >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. This peasant is faulty. He's not indoctrinated enough. Someone nab him and send him for reeducation. /s
  - lukan 9mo ago
    "I didn't say a lynchmob, why do people always assume a bad implementation?" Maybe because of your language? "Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable."
    - martin-t 9mo ago
      Because the optimum is a public process which proves their guilt beyond reasonable doubt so that every good person supports their punishment and has the confidence (certainty of guilt) to support it publicly. But if the choice is between no punishment and somebody gunning them down in the street or droning them, i prefer the latter. Court processes are useful when guilt is uncertain at first look and you want to increase certainty. But dictators and their close supporters, the certainty is often sufficient by nature of many their actions being public. Sometimes they literally go on TV and declare they're going to a foreign country to kill their people and take their land. At that point, it only becomes a matter of making sure you have the right person. And don't forget the victims. Many authoritarian regimes don't kill opposition outright (for various reasons) but imprison them instead. Such a victim knows many of the people (cops, judges, informants, etc.) responsible for / guilty of falsely imprisoning them. After a regime change, the victims go free and have often more knowledge of the offenses than can be proven to a court by the simply virtue of being there and therefore have more than enough confidence to deliver a just punishment.
- potato3732842 9mo ago
  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.
thomassmith65 9mo ago
A peaceful transition of power is nothing to sneer at. After a revolutionary change, they are rare.
- martin-t 9mo ago
  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 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.
- Roark66 9mo ago
  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.

nephihaha 9mo ago

The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.

tim333 9mo ago
People go on about surveillance but it's not really the problem compared to murderous dictatorships.
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  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.
  - tim333 9mo ago
    Yeah but there's lots of surveillance like stuff that goes on without turning into murderous dictatorships. In England where I live we have cctv all over the place and on the internet Google knows most of my stuff but neither really worry me - we haven't really had a dictatorship setup since 1215 or so.
    - nephihaha 9mo ago
      1215? Try Cromwell, or numerous dubious monarchs. The Tudors murdered 10% of the English population, I believe. Other monarchs have usurped the throne and most people never had the vote until Victorian times and after. Then you have the beginnings of an attempted coup against Harold Wilson and Blair using the so called Criminal Justice Bills to force things through. Lockdown demonstrated their powers well. Even Private Eye which poses as a dissident voice towed that line. The UK is certainly not the paradise it thinks it is. Northern Ireland was pretty oppressive throughout much of my lifetime, and the state authorities were part of that along with the paramilitaries. The British state has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to undermine Scottish and Welsh nationalism, including people dying under mysterious circumstances, manufactured political scandals and agents provocateurs. Some declassified information details the effort put into derailing the Scottish independence movement in the sixties and seventies (and even the devolution movement). If you are in England, then agents provocateurs have been common in the environmentalist movement, the far left & far right etc. The Socialist Workers Party has to be one of the most obviously infiltrated groups out there or it certainly looks like it. The state has also tried to make the campaign against Digital ID look ridiculous by linking it to Flat Earth and chemtrail agents provocateurs, even though hostility to it is much more widespread and serious.

mothballed 9mo ago

Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points. It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.

bigstrat2003 9mo ago
That makes sense to me. Authoritarian government is not inherently abusive of citizens, even though it often gets used in rhetoric as though that was the case. It's just that there are no guard rails against the whims of the people in charge, so you better hope you manage to keep good people in charge forever (and that is obviously not going to happen).
- KiwiJohnno 9mo ago
  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
  - account42 9mo ago
    The multi-year terms still lets bad governments do a lot of damage though, and they have to be pretty bad to actually be removed for good. Perhaps it would be better to pick the government at random and then have much more frequent votes with the only choice being whether to pick a new random government or not.
jasonwatkinspdx 9mo ago
If you're a bus driver in Singapore denied the right to protest, strike, and otherwise organize for better pay and conditions, you might feel a bit different about how free Singapore is economically.

coldtea 9mo ago

>People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was

nephihaha 9mo ago
We hear far more about the precursor than the GDR, don't we? (Actually its immediate precursor was Allied Occupied Germany with the GDR being the Soviet zone.)
- lostlogin 9mo ago
  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?
  - jen20 9mo ago
    > especially if you include every time that someone shrieks ‘that’s socialism,’ or ‘that’s communism’ But... why would you include that? They're certainly not discussions of the DDR.
    - nephihaha 9mo ago
      We do have socialised medicine where I live and it is falling apart TBH. Never hear it compared to East Germany.
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    By "we", I didn't mean Americans, but weaterners. We have the National Health Service where I live and it is a complete mess (I know someone who waited over seven years for a jaw operation, another who has several years to wait for autism screening). I don't want the American system, and the basic principle of the NHS is good but still.... This AI slop is a pretty accurate description of my local medical practice (bar the cheap joke at beginning and everyone having an English accent): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3U25wNyVRw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3U25wNyVRw We hardly ever hear about East Germany or all the horrors of living in such a place. Very rarely these days. I've known quite a few people who lived under that regime and they told me what it was like. Everyone was being watched, and even school children had to write spy reports on their neighbours. All while the East German state kept proclaiming how it was a place of freedom and equality.

solarexplorer 9mo ago

> Propane gas tanks became registered products I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left. Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them... This was in the late 80s.

lostlogin 9mo ago
Oh wow. At that point, just make everything a registered item.

Terr_ 9mo ago

The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled [0] was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient. Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues. [0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/

petre 9mo ago
> Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony A security circus and a waste of time. Look at the Korean People's Army. Their main areas of expertise are marching in synchrony, digging trenches, construction and agriculture.
fc417fc802 9mo ago
Meanwhile we put experts to work optimizing conversion and engagement metrics. A truly enlightened way of life we've built for ourselves.
- honzabe 9mo ago
  > 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.
  - 9mo ago