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    "If you thought about it from the perspective of the innocent imprisoned", while there is no denying that police states are bad when looked at from the perspective of the people who get on the wrong side of them, for everyone else it's mostly business as usual. I spent my youth in a totalitarian single party state dictatorship that fits all of the criteria of a police state. The truth is that I barely noticed. We lost some freedoms but gained others. Like being able to walk alone after dark as a girl, or not having race riots like in the US and Europe at the time. Swings and roundabouts. Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 12:04
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    youth being under 35, I barely had any instances were being in a police state were more than a small inconvenience. it was mostly just being asked for my transit papers and only being able to buy certain music on the black market music. being a police state wasn't even close to Nazi Germany, and some of us are Jewish so the comparison is somewhat offensive. Commented Feb 10, 2025 at 15:47
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    that's just it. I wasn't "blissfully ignorant" of anything. I was fully aware of what was happening and I supported the majority of it, as did everyone else because we felt that the tradeoffs in terms of personal and political freedoms were largely worth it not to have the race riots and high crime rates of places like the US. What I'm trying to get home to people is that not all police states are Nazi Germany. We had fewer police shootings and a smaller prison population than the US. The US war on drugs alone put more people in jail than my dictators did for political reasons. Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 16:54
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    With all due respect, my LIVED EXPERIENCE is that "not all" police states persecute everybody all of the time. I am just an ordinary person who lived in an ordinary blue collar town, zero privilege of any kind. My LIVED EXPERIENCE is that most of the time it was just a mild inconvenience for the vast majority of people. Yes, there were secret police but it wasn't like it is in the movies, I only personally knew one family that was sent to a Gulag, and they were released after several years without being tortured or killed. We had a murder rate 10% of the US per 100,000 people. Commented Feb 12, 2025 at 17:46
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    let me be straight, it really wasn't that bad. We had strict laws and state surveillance, and people who tried to subvert the authority of the state were rounded up and put in jail, but this rarely impacted our daily lives because it was very easy not to break the law, and very little that we did was of any interest to the secret police, we just couldn't vote, or campaign to get the vote. If your country put someone in jail for multiple years for breaking and entering, how many years would you have served, to the nearest decade? Commented Feb 13, 2025 at 21:06