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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Worth adding to the Evil Overlord List:

When making decisions about my security forces, I will bear in mind the example of East Germany's supposedly all-knowing and all-powerful Stasi...and of how utterly useless they proved to be. Better to be accidentally killed by the Hero's comic-relief Sidekick than to have my Evil Empire collapse without the Hero having had to lift a finger.

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Stasi was very efficient in suppression of German dissent.

East Germany collapsed on the account of persistent information inflow from the West (TV, radio, zero language barrier against West Germany), plus its ideological allies (the Warsaw Pact led by USSR) abandoning them. A country of 17 million isolated in a sea of non-friendly powers would be unviable. Once USSR dropped the Brezhnev Doctrine of Limited Sovereignty and Poland started introducing democracy, GDR was in a very tight spot.

China won't become isolated anytime soon, and there isn't really an efficient way to supply dissenting news to Chinese people in Chinese en masse. Unfortunately, I believe that Chinese secret service can stay efficient for a long, long time.

Particularly when Hollywood too is self-censoring w.r.t. China.

They also have AI now. Listening in on every phone call and monitoring every video camera is a real possibility for the first time in history.

> there isn't really an efficient way to supply dissenting news to Chinese people in Chinese en masse

What exactly would you like to tell them? A large percentage of Chinese have access to VPNs, travel to other countries, and talk with people from all over. The trade offs that Americans have implicitly made, accepting high street crime in exchange for “freedom” won’t universally be accepted as better. They are a cultural choice.

The average Chinese isn’t eating grass or cowering from Big Brother. Economically, they’re doing significantly better than their parents. The red hot post-war economy Americans reminisce about? Chinese have been living that reality for 40 years now. In America we have recessions once a decade, but up until this year the average Chinese never even knew what a recession was.

Americans have made no such trade off. The amount of street crime is quite low in most of the country. It's only a noticeable problem in a few large cities that have been wrecked by failed progressive policies. My city has literally zero murders most years, and those few that have occurred have been private disputes rather than street crime.

Those “failed progressive policies” are American policies made by American politicians. The United States has very high crime rates compared to China.

If you don’t trust Chinese crime stats, check Singapore’s which are even lower. Singapore is a city bigger than LA but with low crime rates due to cameras and police that know how to do their jobs. Singapore also gives the death penalty for peddling drugs which is a lesson conservative states might have directed at the Sackler family rather than giving them a free pass.

Shootings are common in the U.S. and American politicians have accepted this reality. Even after children are slaughtered, politicians do nothing. Those children pay for American “freedom” with their lives. Other cultures choose to put children first.

" Economically, they’re doing significantly better than their parents."

Are you sure about the really young cohorts? AFAIK youth unemployment in China is so bad that they stopped releasing the stats.

Yes. Even taking the last two years into account, China has gone from a gdp/capita of under $1000 to over $12000 in just 20 years. Thats equivalent to jumping from an Ethiopian economy to a Russian one in the span of a generation. China has poured more concrete since 2000 than the rest of the world combined prior to 2000.

It’s perhaps wishful thinking to believe that oppressive states will automatically fall apart. Stasi-infested East Germany could well have kept existing had it not been located next to a Western democracy that everyone was looking towards. Look at Eritrea or North Korea, for example. China, too, doesn’t have a direct neighbor that exerts the same influence on it as West Germany on the GDR. Moreover, China already began to roll out years ago surveillance tech that the Stasi could have only dreamed of.

In time, all states fall apart. Or get conquered. Or lose a civil war / revolution. Or whatever.

Sure, China has a bunch of advantages (large scale, distinct ethnic/national identity, etc.) that the GDR didn't have. But Chinese history records ~4,000 years of dynasties, emperors, generals, etc. with similar authoritarian ambitions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_in_Chinese_history

Saying "This Time Will Be Different, Because $Yet_Another_New_Reason" also has an extremely long history.

Some of those dynasties lasted hundreds of years. Most recently, the Qing dynasty lasted longer than the United States has (the US being one of the world’s older democracies). I don’t think it’s much solace to people living today that they only need to endure 450 more years of autocratic rule before their nation undergoes a revolution.

And just because the ruling class is overthrown in a country doesn’t mean the material quality of life for everyday people changes. One autocrat replacing another isn’t much better.

North Korea would collapse in a week if it wasn’t propped up by China. I don’t think these evil systems are very stable long term without outside support.

What would happen if no country like North Korea was sanctioned by the US and the west any more?

This stuff isn’t intended to do anything but point the finger away from the man behind the curtain for the current social and economic problems in mainland China. By creating an external boogie man all problems can be attributable to that.

You’ll be surprised how many people you can surveil with StateGPT

don’t laugh - it’s vastly more accurate than xKeyScore and other keyword reliant systems and it has the ability to catch meaning, even if you speak somewhat obfuscated. Not perfect by any means, but a vast improvement on the state of full time surveillance. Regulated industries are already racing adoption for compliance scanning, in combination with Whisper it’s a clear pivot point in surveillance capabilities for anyone who isn’t the NSA

One of the reasons it’s a mistake to withdraw on “the technology is flawed, it hallucinates” - A bit of inaccuracy, an occasional execution of a wrongly accused person isn’t a dealbreaker for countries. What matters is the improvement over the status quo

> how utterly useless they proved to be

Worse than useless. Consider the social and economic utility of people that piss others off.

No actual harm caused. Not bad people. Just those neighbours or colleagues or friend’s significant others that, through selfishness and lack of awareness or simply bullheadedness, question everything and come up creative (sometimes not totally legit or invited) workarounds.

Those people do not survive such regimes. And the societies blighted of them show it rather quickly.

From the worldconquer.org version of the Evil Overlord List:

> 208. Members of my Legion of Terror will attend seminars on Sensitivity Training. It's good public relations for them to be kind and courteous to the general population when not actively engaged in sowing chaos and destruction.

The point of the Stasi wasn’t to find/prosecute dissent, it was to create an environment that prevented it from occurring, spreading, or gaining traction. The Stasi existed to sow the fields of popular politics with salt through creating an environment of paranoia.

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