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> But this is also the beauty of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact total control.

Yeah, right up until you're talked into electing a dictator.

It's just as well that's never happened!

And now he's out. The system's not about preemptively stopping theoretical bad acts per se (although if it actually stops real incoming threats, great), but rather, about being able to evaluate and change course when human fallibility inevitably leads to bad policies, bad choices, and bad outcomes. It's a work in progress, particularly as to how we can properly disincentivize future attempts and hold those who actively attempted to overthrow the Constitutional state by force without resorting to Minority-Report style overbroad invasions of privacy, but at least we can do that. These things are such non-starters in China and Russia that the former more or less acquiesced to a corrupt state and the latter has an economy that was so thoroughly disposessed by the few from the people that its GDP is on par with New York City despite 60 times the population, and with no recourse. Change is never easy nor always correct, but at least that opportunity exists here. It doesn't in many places that purportedly have "order" over "liberty" as the central value, as they end up with neither.

You don't think USA achieved that by being the best ones? See for example history of relationships with Cuba, the same goes for pretty much everything, not only Cuba.

>> Yeah, right up until you're talked into electing a dictator.

> And now he's out.

Trump was never a dictator.

> bad policies, bad choices, and bad outcomes.

Got any examples?

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