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    Good point. Most stories about authoritarian regimes tend to be written from the POV of the dissidents, probably because “going with the flow” makes for a boring plot. But non-dissidents get a rational benefit from increased law and order. Commented Feb 7, 2025 at 19:32
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    @dan04, to be completely honest, most of the time I barely noticed that I was living in a dictatorship, though a number of people that I know were sent to a labor camp Commented Feb 8, 2025 at 12:01
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    @dan04 You get the IMPRESSION of law and order. That's a hell of a lot different from law and order. Like if the police can act on a whim, then you don't have any legal protections and speaking up about your rights or the lack thereof can brand you as "troublemaker". So you can end up the victim of a crime and it's speaking about that, which marks you to be the criminal. Also that's less of an order and more of organized corruption, if judge/jury and executioner are the same person. Commented Feb 10, 2025 at 13:22
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    @haxor789, that's mostly western propaganda. When we look at the US where a sober man can be sent to jail if a passenger has an open beer bottle, where Jay Walking is a thing, and towns can have arbitrary curfews, and not forgetting eminent domain and civil asset forfeiture, we looked at the US as being a police state. The truth is that unless you were some kind of activist trying to go outside of the system things really weren't that bad, you just had to show your ID card a lot more often, and had to buy some music bootlegged. Our justice system also lacked the racial bias of the US. Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 17:01
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    I wonder which country that was. The late Soviet Union had a massive amount of vandalism but also random violent crime, perhaps influenced by chronic lead poisoning from gasoline exhaust. Commented Feb 11, 2025 at 23:23