It&#x27;s amazing how so many of your posts get downvoted without replies, but BS like binge drinking being out of control in Australia, that&#x27;s fine.<p>Has anyone ever been to Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia? No? So how come anyone has an opinion on it? Did all the Americans who supported attacking Iraq spend a few years living there? And how can we know anything about Islamic fundamentalism without having being in such a group? How can we know some nordic nations are <i>actually</i> progressive and sane in some of their laws and attitudes? Who lived there? 0.001% of the people who talk about this and other things where the complaint of not having experienced it first-hand never ever comes up, that&#x27;s who.<p>So how is this anything but an ad-hominem and a distraction? Having lived there doesn&#x27;t necessarily involve paying lots of attention, after all. It&#x27;s a double edged sword, too: Prejudice and hearsay and so on are one thing, but selection bias is another. You could say the only people who ever lived in Singapore are the people who either born there or who weren&#x27;t too appalled by what they know about it to move there. Franz Beckenbauer &quot;didn&#x27;t see any shackled slaves&quot; in Qatar, so it&#x27;s a-okay to him. Does this say something nice about Qatar, or something rather nasty about Franz Beckenbauer? And who is more likely to do a lot of business there, someone like him or someone entirely unlike him? So, does that make him an expert, or rather the one person who can&#x27;t see what is written on his forehead? I&#x27;m not saying Singapore is Qatar, just like I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. But it works for everything. I don&#x27;t have to gamble to have an opinion of gambling, and I don&#x27;t have to play soccer or dance ballet to know it takes a lot of skill.<p>I might as well ask questions like &quot;At which age did you begin to ponder totalitarianism, which authors did you read on it, and what are things you come in contact with daily you would say are somewhat or very aligned with it in spirit?&quot; or &quot;Do you have a rough idea where you are on spectrums such as narcissism or sociopathy, and what your IQ is?&quot;, or &quot;Does the following quote [badly translated from the German edition by me] remind you of anything in the technology sector, and stuff you can read all the time on the interwebs, if you don&#x27;t hear it in real life? (that is, pseudo-scientific claims of why things are how they are, and why they <i>have</i> to proceed as they do)&quot;<p>&gt; <i>We don&#x27;t know any perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of all of the planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway.</i>
-- Hannah Arendt, &quot;The Origins of Totalitarianism&quot;, page 683 in the German edition<p>and so on. There are a lot of more serious &quot;litmus tests&quot; and more important questions than &quot;have you actually lived there&quot;. It&#x27;s like someone asking &quot;Have you ever <i>been</i> to the gallery of artist X, or did you just see a blurry 5 second smartphone video clip?&quot;, without the question whether the person who was there is blind even coming up. If people want to talk about people rather than ideas and facts, let&#x27;s talk about people. I find it lame, but if it has to be at least let&#x27;s not half-ass it so badly.