invalidusernamelol [he/him]

  • 2 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2020

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  • The conversation was you linking a Wikipedia article, I was at least hoping you’d link like a book or something. Like we could have a discussion if you were trying to argue against authoritarianiam as defined by say Bakunin or some other anarchist thinker.

    Then I could respond with On Authority which argues that authority is a natural consequence of any organization and calling something authoritarian just means you’re saying that it’s a system that is able to successfully reproduce itself.

    You could also try to link “authoritarianism” to fascism, but again that is pointless because there’s already a term for fascism, which is Fascism.




  • All states are authoritarian. Where do you think all the authority comes from?

    A state having authority isn’t always a bad thing though, the current state is really great if you’re a white male property owner!

    And those guys won’t be too happy if you take that state away from them, so whatever comes next would need the authority to resist that counter-revolution.

    But that’s authoritarian, so we should just let them take back over and keep doing the authoritarianism that supports their interests.






  • more specifically I consider the USA (varying by state and location) to be pretty authoritarian in a lot of ways, though they have decent press freedom (even if there are pretty severe issues with copyright and larger media conglomerates being owned by investment corpos), which is kind of an anomaly given many other things like drug laws and police militarisation and such :/ (many other things too)

    Damn, you’re like 90% of the way there, but you still only see the trees.

    US has no freedom of the press because all media is privately owned and even state media is privately financed. The entire 4th estate is literally just an appendage of the ruling class. Freedom of the press isn’t private ownership of the press, it’s independence and democratic oversight over the press, something that exists in no capacity in America.

    In the US you have freedom to purchase the press



  • Your distinction really has no meaning when there are places in China where people can be openly LGBTQ same as America with the US being more actively hostile to people in most places.

    I’m fine with the use of the term authoritarian if it has actual meaning, but the way it’s used here it’s totally context less unless you just assume whoever is saying it is saying it as a stand in for “not a Western liberal democracy”.

    A thing which actually cheapens a term which was meant primarily to refer to fascist dictatorships and feudal dictatorships.