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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

I think the apparatus available to today's government for spying on its citizens would make a 1980s KGB or Stasi agent blush.

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So called "Totalitarian" regimes only spy on dissidents and free thinkers, they don't give a f* about other people. It's only democratic regimes that tend to keep a tally of every citizen and his/her movements.

Not entirely accurate. When you say "free thinkers", I think you're mainly referring to some civil libertarians or some sort. But in communist countries they used to get people to spy on each other and report their friends and neighbors to the secret police if they said anything bad at all against the government or "the party".

So everyone was under constant surveillance, not just by the government, because they didn't have those kinds of resources, but by everyone around them, too.

Perhaps, but the government did not care how many children were born or old men died in some remote village.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

Upwards of 200 million people are spinning in their mass graves at your abject ignorance of the 20th century history of totalitarianism.

Hint: the world "total" is a clue.

I was under the impression (and a brief skimming of the article you linked seems to support) that the one-child policy didn't apply in rural areas, so while it was a cute refutation of the government not caring "how many children were born" it seems to be an inaccurate one of the government not caring "how many children were born [...] in some remote village".

... I write this assuming the earlier comment wasn't amended to tack on the phrase; if it was, my apologies...

Obviously you're not familiar with this disastrous policy and how it's often heinously executed in the sticks; from the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Current_status):

"Current status

"The limit has been strongly enforced in urban areas, but the actual implementation varies from location to location. In most rural areas, families are allowed to apply to have a second child if their first-born is a daughter or suffers from physical disability, mental illness or mental retardation. Second children are subject to birth spacing (usually 3 or 4 years). Additional children will result in large fines. Families violating the policy are required to pay monetary penalties.... [ Lots more detail. ]"

So, yes, they do care about "remote villages". Enough to place them under the control of the government; don't know how true this was for the rural areas, but back before a free market in food was allowed, getting on the wrong side of the local functionaries resulted in your not getting ration tickets and dying of starvation, or so I was told by a couple from the PRC in the late '80s. Those same functionaries enforce this policy and they're not polite about it.

Seriously, do some very basic research before you continue to downplay the utter horror of totalitarian societies.

My bad.

Your tone is inappropriate, however - a link is shallow; when we get into discussion, we learn things.

Ah, yes, sorry about the tone. I didn't notice that you were replying instead of the original nsns; he was the one my ire and e.g. last sentence was directed towards.

Ah, yes, happens.

In Stalin's USSR, that was not true. Generally there were folks (or even a lone soul) in every village answering to the state, expected to keep that area toeing the party line. Absurd meetings on party ideology would be held in the most remote of places, with a close eye kept on those who could be some threat to the state. The Gulag Archipelago, Vol 2 discusses the intersection of the surveillance state and everyday life at length.

When you say "free thinkers", I think you're mainly referring to some civil libertarians or some sort.

It's more than "some civil libertarians." Totalitarian regimes commonly victimize academics as a threat to the homogeneity they seek to impose.

You should keep in mind that Cambodia under Pol Pot considered anyone with glasses to be an intellectual and were killed.

I did not mean in any way to imply I'd prefer anything but democracy, just to remind us of its panoptic[0] urge.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism

drool, more likely.

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