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Comment by huijzer | Hacker News Reader

And which country has some checks and balances and which has none? If an autocratic leaders wants you to disappear, you disappear. And journalists inside the nation will never talk about you again. Apart from maybe that you have retired, are an amazing painter now, and are having a lovely time.

Joe Tsai about his former Alibaba co-founder: https://youtu.be/KveMLJNhwkc

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I genuinely don’t know which country you believe has checks and balances.

It's gotta be the one with an unelected billionaire installing spyware in all government administrations.

This is after they had been caught wiretapping every citizen in the country, with controls so loose that analysts could use it to stalk their exes.

Right, its safer to have private capital police state.

Guantanamo has big fat checks and balances.

Instead of reading about how “terrible” the US system is, I encourage readers to listen to what historians say about autocratic regimes and to see whether these things still apply today.

One difference for example is that in the West, it is allowed to criticize your own government. In autocratic regimes on the other hand it might cause you to “retire” early.

Yes, censorship incidents like the red scare, Hollywood blackballing, and outright assassinations (hi Fred Hampton) would definitely never happen in the United States.

That’s why Bush illegally wiretapping every American citizen was excusable - Bush would never retaliate against critics, like trying to kill Valerie Plame for exposing his lies.

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