China and other repressive regimes, of course, continue to keep information flows to a minimum, but the pressure of faster, cheaper, and smaller computers is unrelenting.
Of course repressive regimes, and prisons designed to do harm, exist.
In fact, of course, these repressive Arab societies — so illustrative of Western hypocrisy in their power structures, so deadening to the hopes of the young, so shot through with nepotism and cronyism, so distant from a glimpsed modernity — resembled factories for militant Islam rather than bulwarks against it.
But one-sided elections are, of course, not limited to repressive regimes.
The irony, of course, is that as repressive and violent forces increase their participation in the global news ecosystem, the need for independent voices and eyewitness documentation becomes even more acute.
The Kremlin can then turn away from the permissiveness that enabled Navalny to run and can resume the repressive course of the past year.
Part of the problem is that joylessness is bred into golfers from an early age by absurd fees, repressive dress codes and pristine courses that (silently, of course) scream, "Don't even think of doing a celebratory jig on my fragile, chemically maintained surface".
Of course, the fight against bribery relies on repressive measures.
Iran is of course an authoritarian state, though not as repressive as western allies such as Saudi Arabia.
Rather, they remind us not to indulge in a false nostalgia about an arbitrary set of years (a nostalgia whose mirror image is, of course, the 50s as staid, awful, and repressive).
