Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "China reveals details of new Hong Kong national security law | DW News" video.
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@marystevens8444 The question is, how many people are worth sacrificing and how many lives are worth ruining in order to achieve this elusive freedom?
My answer is, it depends on the nature of the tyranny. If a tyrant is genuinely trying to take care of his people and he/she's not a total incompetent then I don't think the likely benefits to society of pursuing freedom outweigh the likely costs. This is especially the case considering that what replaces a tyrant after a revolution is usually another tyrant, as well as an ideological purity purge.
There are and have been tyrants that are so incompetent, narcissistic. paranoid and sadistic that they had to go, but even among tyrants that combination is pretty rare. If the freedom you're willing to overthrow a functional government for is the abstract basket of freedoms that make up the Western Enlightenment dogma, then for the majority of people the results will be disappointing, if not catastrophic. If, on the other hand, the freedom you're willing to overthrow a functional government for is to free yourself and your people from a tyrant that cruelly abuses its people (and I'm not just talking about a couple of dissidents here and there), then perhaps it's a risk worth taking.
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