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What do you think preparing looks like, if not fighting for civil liberties and maintaining our ability to coordinate politically without being targeted? To me it looks like you'd mock anyone fighting government overreach right up until it's too late.
Do you think those murdered by their governments in the 20th century had "time to prepare", but simply chose to not to? Do you remember the borders being closed with no warning during covid?
This very much depends on context, but in the case of murder by one's own government, usually yes.
German Jews had "time to prepare" in that it was obvious that a murderously anti-semitic political force was in the ascendant since 1930, and most of them did - the core fact about the Holocaust they don't teach you is that it was mostly a genocide of defeated enemy Jews because only 180,000 or so Jews were left in Germany proper to Holocaust.
The various groups that would be predictably disfavoured by the Soviets also had fair warning (the Soviet Union didn't actually enforce emigration restrictions until 1928, a decade after the revolution) and those who had the resources to get out, did so (more than 1% of the pre-revolution population emigrated). If you were a Ukrainian kulak, you had "time to prepare" but probably not the resources to do anything about it - with 21st century transport tech and refugee law, I think most would have got out. The people who got gulagged in the 1930's included actual political opponents of the regime, but also a significant number of people who were effectively swept up at random - that isn't something people manage to plan around.
I am less sure about precisely what happened in China, but the Great Leap Forward looks like a combination of "insane regime kills at random" and genuine incompetence in a country poor enough to have no margin for error, and the Cultural Revolution is the Trope Codifier for "insane regime kills at random". In any case, Communist rule in China follows a period of 30 years of pervasive political violence (warlordism, murderous military government under Chiang Kai-Shek, Japanese invasion, civil war)
The much more common case is "Lose war, get occupied, get genocided". Contrary to the usual spin, this covers the vast majority of Nazi victims. It also covers most of the post-1945 communist victims - if you became an ethnic minority in the USSR as a result of the Soviets conquering your country in WW2, things were unlikely to end well for you. (And, of course, all the colonial genocides). I
So in summary, "Emigrate if you find yourself ruled by people who hate you" seems to be a heuristic that people tend to put into practice if they have the resources, with the result that "Government genocides a disfavoured minority group in its own core territory" is a much less common threat model than people think it is. "Emigrate if you think your country might lose a war in the near future" and "Emigrate if your country might fall under communist rule in the near future." are similarly good heuristics, but ones which people seem to struggle with acting on.
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So, what's the ground truth here? When you unbox a smartphone do you decline to log into a Google/Apple account so you can sync because you're worried that if you say yes there's a 1% chance that's how you end up in a gas chamber some day? If this isn't you, are you saying you sympathize with that view?
What do you mean by "ground truth"? I personally don't make many sacrifices for privacy or civil liberty's sake, but I'm grateful when others do.
Where I live I already don't have freedom of speech or association, and the government recently froze the bank accounts of protesters whom the state-run news agency had already demonized.
Again, how do you think anyone ends up in a gas chamber?
Do you believe Canada is on the slippery slope towards gas chambers?
I've read about a couple of these situations and the best answer I can take away is: they live in a place that has gone insane.
Yes, that's it. Sadly, places that have gone insane don't make it necessarily obvious that they have gone insane, because they attempt to gaslight the sane. And being nice prosocial apes those sane ones waste a lot of time they could be using to get away from insane place wondering if everyone around them seeming insane is not what insane people observe about the world.
I wouldn't say quite that, but canadian culture in particular is uniquely vulnerable to mass insanity and mass manipulation, being obsessed with getting along over anything else. So while it's not on the slope right now, you can be sure the canadian slope is gonna be steep and well lubrified when we get on it.
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This is indeed the main anxiety of those who confound you, I suspect, and moreover, the main driver of our modern discourse.
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From my view everyone who raged teary-eyed against government "overreach" like the PATRIOT act or FISA has been proven wrong to date. This stuff did not at all alter life in the US except for giving the government slightly more power to investigate crime.
I'll be really embarrassed if this all paved the way for a USA Patriot Points social credit system but I just don't see that taking off in the US. The notion sounds really far-fetched.
I agree that some people were overly certain about the consequences of the PATRIOT act. But I would still rage teary-eyed against government overreach even if I were merely worried it would lead to tyranny, because once the government is totalitarian it's very hard to come back from that.
Also, in that time there have been various counter-movements, such as Snowden's, that pushed back against mass surveillance. But that could have easily not happened, and plus the state has presumably hardened itself against the next Snowden since then.
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How are you going to know if the government investigated you secretly and then made some excuse about it? Look up parallel construction.
Touched on here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183560?context=8#context
I'm not denying it doesn't happen, it obviously does sometimes. So, that said, what's the argument in response? Because parallel construction could happen (and sometimes does), that means the government therefore should not have access to these tools without a court order ahead of time and if it wrecks their ability to counter terrorist plots or organized crime or handle fast-moving cases, so be it?
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