> A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent.

I wish you could have seen the meme-able face I made when I read this.

Putin is similarly popular in Russia, China's government is also incredibly popular with its citizens, and Nicaragua's government is so popular with its people that they just decided not to have elections anymore! There is a remarkable correlation between authoritarian governments and popularity with their citizens, don't you think?

> For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.

Invasive state surveillance and authoritarianism are not the only answers to crime, San Francisco is not the only city in the US, and crime rates in San Francisco have been overall flat or declining for the last few years (https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/02/san-francisco-2025-crime-s...). That's a false dichotomy, cherry-picking, and a false premise ... gotta be some kind of bingo card for this somewhere.

I suspect the true nature of this disagreement is that you feel more threatened by a free society than an authoritarian one. I wonder, how does someone reconcile the ideas of a free market and a non-free society?