Authoritarian is a nothing-word used to describe enemy-nations. It’s like calling their government a “regime” or their intelligence agencies “secret police” or the vice-president the “hand picked successor”.
I’ve never seen a definition - neither academic or by some farthuffing Redditor - that wasn’t so broad as to just be describing a state or so specific it wasn’t just a longer way of spelling “China”.
Every state is authoritarian. Reducing political analysis to wether a state does stuff and not what it does, why it does it, or with what amount of popular support, is top-tier liberal winecave apparatchik intelligentsia thought. No actual insights, but it makes you seem like you know stuff, if you don’t think about it at all. And going against the concept makes you seem like a villain because who wants to defend “authoritarianism”?
The definition came out in the fucking 60’s while the US was busy beating the shit out every protestor it could, yet somehow that wasn’t authoritarian.[1]
Running around with HUAC screaming about authoritarian communism. Funding death squads, secretly approving money to royal families, forcibly relocating the poor and marginalised, all the shit the west did in Africa, all the crackdowns in west Germany, the ongoing colonialism, Robert Moses and his European copycats, shit like the syphilis and LSD experiments; all this occuring in the nations decrying the USSR - and now China - for being “authoritarian”.
Britain is a police state today, the US is a modern Prussia, but the army is replaced with 17 different types of cops, the EU is funding concentration camps for refugees abroad and I can tell you from experience the cops have pretty free reign here too. We’re all surveilled up the ass and out again, but somehow China is an authoritarian danger? I’m supposed to be afraid that TikTok tells Xi Jinping knows when It take a shit, but its completely fine that my own overlords get the same info from the billion other trackers that are everywhere? People say “two wrongs don’t make a right” in response to this, but it seems like they think one of the wrongs is pretty right, and it’s the wrong that’s hanging over our heads - while the one around the globe is something to worry about[2]
Its the same shit as totalitarianism - incidentally both concepts popularized by Hannah Arendt - which was just a fuckass way for dumbasses to sound smart when they uniquely observed that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used state power to do stuff - What stuff they did apparently having no matter at all, what percentage of approval from the populace or involvement mattering neither. No, what was important was that both states Did Stuff and that meant they were the same.
Now what if you pointed out that the US Did Stuff too? Well that’s whataboutism, a clever Russian ploy to make you want to have a consistent ideological throughline in your geopolitical critique.
What if you pointed out how old colonial powers like France were still Doing Stuff?[3] Well that’s Old Stuff so it doesn’t matter. Or it doesn’t matter because they aren’t superpowers or whatever.
If you’re not a commited anarchist then I will not hear you utter a word in favour of Authoritarianism as an academic concept.
If you claim to be one then I am going to need to see some serious dissertation on leftist theory from you, as well as proof that you actually organise in the real world, because I know there’s enough larping lemmitors who don’t want to admit they’re just libs, because they can’t stand the thought of not being a special smart little kid.
Even then I am going to shit in your mouth if you’re an anarchist and you’re more concerned or preoccupied with what china is doing rather than whatever hellhole of a nation you live in yourself.
Incidentally from the early 50’s and onwards the soviet gulag system had a lower recidivism rate, lower death rate and overall higher QoL than the US system. ↩︎
Did you know the “social credit system” only ever applied to businesses? Fuck i wish the yeomen farmers back home were kept half as responsible as they are in China ↩︎
and are still Doing Stuff, did you know they control the monetary policy of several African nations? ↩︎
Trying to dodge responsibility for your ableism by flipping around to how annoying you percieve those that call you out for it doesn’t work. Just take ownership and do better, it isn’t particularly difficult to do either and it results in personal growth and development.
Authoritarian is a nothing-word used to describe enemy-nations. It’s like calling their government a “regime” or their intelligence agencies “secret police” or the vice-president the “hand picked successor”.
I’ve never seen a definition - neither academic or by some farthuffing Redditor - that wasn’t so broad as to just be describing a state or so specific it wasn’t just a longer way of spelling “China”.
Every state is authoritarian. Reducing political analysis to wether a state does stuff and not what it does, why it does it, or with what amount of popular support, is top-tier liberal winecave apparatchik intelligentsia thought. No actual insights, but it makes you seem like you know stuff, if you don’t think about it at all. And going against the concept makes you seem like a villain because who wants to defend “authoritarianism”?
The definition came out in the fucking 60’s while the US was busy beating the shit out every protestor it could, yet somehow that wasn’t authoritarian.[1]
Running around with HUAC screaming about authoritarian communism. Funding death squads, secretly approving money to royal families, forcibly relocating the poor and marginalised, all the shit the west did in Africa, all the crackdowns in west Germany, the ongoing colonialism, Robert Moses and his European copycats, shit like the syphilis and LSD experiments; all this occuring in the nations decrying the USSR - and now China - for being “authoritarian”.
Britain is a police state today, the US is a modern Prussia, but the army is replaced with 17 different types of cops, the EU is funding concentration camps for refugees abroad and I can tell you from experience the cops have pretty free reign here too. We’re all surveilled up the ass and out again, but somehow China is an authoritarian danger? I’m supposed to be afraid that TikTok tells Xi Jinping knows when It take a shit, but its completely fine that my own overlords get the same info from the billion other trackers that are everywhere? People say “two wrongs don’t make a right” in response to this, but it seems like they think one of the wrongs is pretty right, and it’s the wrong that’s hanging over our heads - while the one around the globe is something to worry about[2]
Its the same shit as totalitarianism - incidentally both concepts popularized by Hannah Arendt - which was just a fuckass way for dumbasses to sound smart when they uniquely observed that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union used state power to do stuff - What stuff they did apparently having no matter at all, what percentage of approval from the populace or involvement mattering neither. No, what was important was that both states Did Stuff and that meant they were the same.
Now what if you pointed out that the US Did Stuff too? Well that’s whataboutism, a clever Russian ploy to make you want to have a consistent ideological throughline in your geopolitical critique.
What if you pointed out how old colonial powers like France were still Doing Stuff?[3] Well that’s Old Stuff so it doesn’t matter. Or it doesn’t matter because they aren’t superpowers or whatever.
Here’s someone else shitting on her better than I could https://mirror.explodie.org/Losurdo___Critique_of_Totalitarianism_(2004).pdf
If you’re not a commited anarchist then I will not hear you utter a word in favour of Authoritarianism as an academic concept.
If you claim to be one then I am going to need to see some serious dissertation on leftist theory from you, as well as proof that you actually organise in the real world, because I know there’s enough larping lemmitors who don’t want to admit they’re just libs, because they can’t stand the thought of not being a special smart little kid.
Even then I am going to shit in your mouth if you’re an anarchist and you’re more concerned or preoccupied with what china is doing rather than whatever hellhole of a nation you live in yourself.
Incidentally from the early 50’s and onwards the soviet gulag system had a lower recidivism rate, lower death rate and overall higher QoL than the US system. ↩︎
Did you know the “social credit system” only ever applied to businesses? Fuck i wish the yeomen farmers back home were kept half as responsible as they are in China ↩︎
and are still Doing Stuff, did you know they control the monetary policy of several African nations? ↩︎
Removed by mod
Libs
Fascists
Resorting to chauvinism whenever someone disagrees with them.
Read a book
Removed by mod
What an odd thing to write
It’s the ableism in your comment, throwing neurodivergent people under the bus for a quick jab.
It must be exhausting, getting offended by everything that way.
Trying to dodge responsibility for your ableism by flipping around to how annoying you percieve those that call you out for it doesn’t work. Just take ownership and do better, it isn’t particularly difficult to do either and it results in personal growth and development.