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Cpt_Obvious posted:What does the term "authoritarian" mean in the context of this discussion? Does it mean anything which is not a liberal democracy? I can't speak for everyone else, but I explicitly stated how I interpret the term in the context of this specific discussion — right there in my post above yours.
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Jan 19, 2022 04:55
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Smeef posted:I can't speak for everyone else, but I explicitly stated how I interpret the term in the context of this specific discussion — right there in my post above yours. Would you associate massive lockdowns and forced quarantines with 'authoritarian'? Do you believe those measures helped to curb the spread of Covid and save lives?
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Jan 19, 2022 05:15
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Judakel posted:Did those authoritarian countries have the resources China has? You know, something very much relevant to whether you can actually pull it off? I've read the discussion, I am still baffled as to how you can think you've constructed a rule based on 2 countries, one of which does not follow the rule. Whether other countries have the resources or not is irrelevent, you can't postulate that authoritarian countries deal with the pandemic well and non-authoritarian countries don't when *by your own omission* only two countries have dealt with it well, and one of those countries is non-authoritarian. C'mon man, you can understand this, right? Cpt_Obvious posted:What does the term "authoritarian" mean in the context of this discussion? Does it mean anything which is not a liberal democracy? I don't think it's necessarily relevant at this stage, given that we're apparently only talking about China and Taiwan. So, whatever China is that Taiwan isn't.
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Jan 19, 2022 06:35
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I am once again asking you to read the discussion, because that is one of the things I brought up when Smeef brought up a similar point.
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I mean, you used an extremely narrow definition that related only to specific instances. It doesn't really help me to understand "authoritarian" as it pertains to the original discussion about Covid. Fair enough — and to be clear, I am not proposing that how I'm using it in this case should be a universal definition, and my interpretation there was meant to avoid getting too bogged down in a definition. To answer your questions in the second paragraph: No, I don't see lockdowns or quarantines as necessarily authoritarian, and both have curbed the spread of Covid and saved lives, both in China and elsewhere. I think China's control of information during the pandemic probably qualifies as authoritarian, though, and has probably not been helpful.
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Jan 19, 2022 06:41
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Daduzi posted:I don't think it's necessarily relevant at this stage, given that we're apparently only talking about China and Taiwan. So, whatever China is that Taiwan isn't. so taiwan good, china bad? this sounds rather biased
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Jan 19, 2022 11:25
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lollontee posted:so taiwan good, china bad? this sounds rather biased I'm just going off of Judakel's posts. Besides, who said authoritarian was bad?
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Jan 19, 2022 11:44
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Daduzi posted:I'm just going off of Judakel's posts. Besides, who said authoritarian was bad? plenty of people itt have explicitly stated that china is bad because authoritarian
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Jan 19, 2022 11:49
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lollontee posted:plenty of people itt have explicitly stated that china is bad because authoritarian Nah. China is bad because even though they have made several live-action remakes of "Journey to the West", they are yet to make a live action movie version of 喜羊羊与灰太狼 (Xie Yang Yang and Hui Tai Lang) You know, the really cool cartoon about the sheep and the wolves. Angelababy could play Hong Tai Lang, (the wolf's wife who beats him with a frying pan.) It'd be cool.  (Hong Tai Lang shown here for reference.)
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Jan 19, 2022 13:02
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Not China, the CCP
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Jan 19, 2022 13:02
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Darkest Auer posted:Not China, the CCP i rather doubt most posters here griping about chinese successes make the difference in their brains
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Jan 19, 2022 13:19
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Daduzi posted:I'm just going off of Judakel's posts. Besides, who said authoritarian was bad? you're maybe not gonna find many examples of people literally saying the words "authoritarian is bad" in this thread, but it's pretty heavily implied in the following posts that i got from clicking on a single random page of search results in this thread for the word "authoritarian", of which there are many more pages to pick from Slow News Day posted:I think it probably has more to do with ignorance than apathy. Most Americans wouldn’t be able to spot Taiwan on the map. Kavros posted:And then you compare it against learned historical testimony from what people endured in previous systems that turned autocratic / dictatorial / authoritarian, and what similarities they share Megillah Gorilla posted:But the trains run on time! BrigadierSensible posted:It is an international incident because both the accuser, (a famous sports star), and the accused, (a famous politician) are famous internationally. Somaen posted:Yeah it's also a sign of a very bad dishonest person when you're dismissing rape when you need to defend the honour of your favourite authoritarian state and weaponizing it when it can be used against a state you dislike. Pretty simple to stop coming to this thread I think? Or is there an uncontrollable force to post rape apology MikeC posted:lol, goons raging that they can't obtain the privilege of living under a repressive and authoritarian government just because they are all in on Covid zero.
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Jan 19, 2022 13:32
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"well what is authoritarian really" is, I suspect, a much easier argument to make if you don't actually live under that manner of rule. But let's state the obvious and point out that no one will come to my house and warn me if I compare someone in power in the US to Winnie the Pooh. Or if, you know, I posted online about the whole Actually Currently Commiting Genocide thing. Or pointing out that WE MUST GRIND ALL THE HAMSTERS TO DUST is not a good way to prevent disease, much less make your government look good. Although when the notion of animal rights so terrifies the Party, because it might give it's citizens the idea that they too might actually be deserving of basic rights.... I assume there's some weird indoctrination way of explaining to your daughter that her guinea pig must die so that the party can claim it gives a rats rear end about keeping this disease away. Plastic_Gargoyle fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 13:38
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Plastic_Gargoyle posted:"well what is authoritarian really" is, I suspect, a much easier argument to make if you don't actually live under that manner of rule. just because nobody cares about what you think or post, doesnt mean you wont commit suicide by firing three bullets to the back of your own head if you ever try to organize against the numerous genocides that the US is currently, actively committing. the US is not a good example of a non-authoritarian system of government, as it is infact, brutally and murderously authoritarian
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Jan 19, 2022 13:49
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Plastic_Gargoyle posted:Or pointing out that WE MUST GRIND ALL THE HAMSTERS TO DUST is not a good way to prevent disease, much less make your government look good. Denmark slaughtered its entire mink stock a year ago, does that make denmark authoritarian?
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Jan 19, 2022 13:50
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lollontee posted:just because nobody cares about what you think or post, doesnt mean you wont commit suicide by firing three bullets to the back of your own head if you ever try to organize against the numerous genocides that the US is currently, actively committing. the US is not a good example of a non-authoritarian system of government, as it is infact, brutally and murderously authoritarian "Organize" in the context that you're probably referring to is something that any government tends to frown upon, yes.
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Jan 19, 2022 13:53
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lollontee posted:Denmark slaughtered its entire mink stock a year ago, does that make denmark authoritarian? Are minks housepets Did anyone break into the house of a quarantined mink owner and beat her mink to death. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 19, 2022 13:54
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so you got nothing to add except hampster rights
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Jan 19, 2022 13:56
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I mean lets just pick three incredibly low bars indicating whether your government cares about popular consent or not: freedom of association, freedom of expression, competitive elections. China is very obviously in a very different category to any Western Liberal Democracy on any of those.
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Jan 19, 2022 14:00
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Alchenar posted:I mean lets just pick three incredibly low bars indicating whether your government cares about popular consent or not: freedom of association, freedom of expression, competitive elections. and why would we pick those bars?
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Jan 19, 2022 14:01
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lollontee posted:and why would we pick those bars? Because that's how political science tends to define authoritarianism?
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Jan 19, 2022 14:03
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lollontee posted:and why would we pick those bars? Yes I know you don't want to fight on that ground or indeed any ground in your desperate attempt to convince us all that words don't mean anything. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 19, 2022 14:03
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as we can see by the general distrust of the western people towards all of those conditions, none of those bars guarantee any kind of "popular concent", as they can be managed and manipulated. liberal democracy does not guarantee you anything, except the right to starve
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Jan 19, 2022 14:04
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Alchenar posted:Yes I know you don't want to fight on that ground or indeed any ground in your desperate attempt to convince us all that words don't mean anything. no no, im just trying to point out to everyone that supposed freedoms that we supposedly enjoy in the west are all conditional and managed. and that bringing up lib concepts from 200 years is a poo poo argument
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Jan 19, 2022 14:04
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lollontee posted:as we can see by the general distrust of the western people towards all of those conditions, none of those bars guarantee any kind of "popular concent", as they can be managed and manipulated. liberal democracy does not guarantee you anything, except the right to starve Which is endlessly entertaining given you're defending a system responsible for possibly the single worst man made famine in all of human history.
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Jan 19, 2022 14:05
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Plastic_Gargoyle posted:"well what is authoritarian really" is, I suspect, a much easier argument to make if you don't actually live under that manner of rule. This is also not to mention the extensive digital surveillance they are engaged in (it always makes me laugh when there's a story about THE CCP SPYING ON YOU THROUGH TIKTOK or whatever when GCHQ or the NSA is probably cataloguing every single electronic communication I make), and, of course, the use of very "authoritarian" techniques by the CIA, the US government and its proxies overseas in order to sustain the system of global capitalism. Like, I think to an extent you have to take account of the whole system, so while it's true that you probably won't get murdered/imprisoned by the state for protesting in Washington, that's not true in a lot of places run by people put in power and continuously supported by the world's greatest liberal democracy. quote:Or pointing out that WE MUST GRIND ALL THE HAMSTERS TO DUST is not a good way to prevent disease, much less make your government look good. Also, I appreciate the pun but I think you'd be hard pressed to argue the CPC don't genuinely care about containing coronavirus, particularly when people can't stop complaining about them trying to contain the coronavirus.
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Jan 19, 2022 14:07
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lollontee posted:no no, im just trying to point out to everyone that supposed freedoms that we supposedly enjoy in the west are all conditional and managed. and that bringing up lib concepts from 200 years is a poo poo argument Yes, because the people behind these governments didn't fall off of a turnip truck. Of course there isn't absolutely unrestricted freedom of speech, that's an idiotic line of argument.
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Jan 19, 2022 14:07
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XMNN posted:This is an interesting point to me, because we do know that Western governments are actually very happy to operate secret police forces and spy on and murder political dissidents in their own countries. Obviously you have the many and varied activities of the FBI, and from my own country (the UK) the police actively monitor all sorts of left wing and environmental groups and there's a big scandal about undercover officers basically raping activists by engaging in extremely deceptive relationships with them. This is of course not to mention the activities of the British security state in Northern Ireland, where they orchestrated all sorts of killings and carried out internment etc. Bolded the portion here that literally no one in these positions actually thinks about. You're also not recognizing that the ability to even say this undermines your whole point.
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Jan 19, 2022 14:11
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lollontee posted:plenty of people itt have explicitly stated that china is bad because authoritarian lollontee posted:just because nobody cares about what you think or post, doesnt mean you wont commit suicide by firing three bullets to the back of your own head if you ever try to organize against the numerous genocides that the US is currently, actively committing. the US is not a good example of a non-authoritarian system of government, as it is infact, brutally and murderously authoritarian lollontee posted:as we can see by the general distrust of the western people towards all of those conditions, none of those bars guarantee any kind of "popular concent", as they can be managed and manipulated. liberal democracy does not guarantee you anything, except the right to starve I’m confused on what your overall point is. Are you saying that authoritarianism [to the point of China] isn’t inherently bad? Or that the US is no less of an authoritarian state than China? Or some other point?
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Jan 19, 2022 14:32
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I don't think it does, but perhaps I didn't convey it clearly enough. I was essentially trying to say that liberal democracies are perfectly happy to use methods one could easily describe as authoritarian (secret police spying on activists, spying on every citizen, murdering people) even in the imperial core, and they are prepared to commit much worse atrocities elsewhere in the world. Is it only authoritarian to massacre protestors in your own country, but actually fine to install and support a dictator somewhere else that massacres protestors there? I guess you can break this down into authoritarian areas and less authoritarian areas, but if they're all part of the same system (US global hegemony) I don't see why we have to exclude certain regions from our analysis as a whole. If we look at the actions of countries we are presumably happy to call liberal democracies (e.g. USA, France, UK) we can see that they often have very little respect for human rights when people aren't looking, so it seems weird to presume caring about human rights is somehow a key component of this ideology. Like, I'm not saying that authoritarianism doesn't exist, I just think it's weird that we don't consider the very shady activities of the security services or the whole system of global capitalism when we start thinking about whether the US system is authoritarian or not. e: Idk I guess there's just something about looking at a country like the UK and saying, OK we are an integral part of an economic system we are largely responsible for creating that has impoverished billions of people around the world, we were perfectly happy to torture, imprison, murder anyone who stood in our way, we are to this day backing regimes like Saudi Arabia to commit genocide and imprison activists, but because we let you say that we're bad for doing those things we're actually good and respectful of human rights XMNN fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 14:32
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XMNN posted:I don't think it does, but perhaps I didn't convey it clearly enough. exactly, western liberal democracies are just better at doing authoritarianism surreptitiously, and controlling the "freedom of expression" of the people by ensuring that the majority news the people receive are from government-approved sources like the CNN and other corporate sources intensily tied with the interests of the Empire. westerners simply like to pretend we have more freedoms than those poor, subjugated masses of the east. we do not. "authoritarianism" as a thing that China is living under, but the west supposedly isnt, does not exist. it is infact, simple arrogance
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Jan 19, 2022 14:41
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XMNN posted:I don't think it does, but perhaps I didn't convey it clearly enough. It sounds like you’re describing imperialism, not authoritarianism? Which is probably why you don’t hear the US described as authoritarian based on the global actions you’re describing. Unless I’m misunderstanding you. Kalit fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 14:48
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Kalit posted:It sounds like you’re describing imperialism, not authoritarianism? Unless I’m misunderstanding you. ah yes, the opposite of authoritarian imperialism, liberal imperialism
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Jan 19, 2022 14:50
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Plastic_Gargoyle posted:"well what is authoritarian really" is, I suspect, a much easier argument to make if you don't actually live under that manner of rule. But you're just cherry picking bad things China does that the US doesn't. I could just as easily point out that:
So therefore the US is more authoritarian than China? Also I do find it funny how you specifically selected being able to TALK about the genocide being committed by a certain country. As if the genocide itself isn't authoritarian as long as citizens of the imperial core are allowed to fecklessly whine about it in public.
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Jan 19, 2022 14:54
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lollontee posted:exactly, western liberal democracies are just better at doing authoritarianism surreptitiously, and controlling the "freedom of expression" of the people by ensuring that the majority news the people receive are from government-approved sources like the CNN and other corporate sources intensily tied with the interests of the Empire. westerners simply like to pretend we have more freedoms than those poor, subjugated masses of the east. we do not. This is absolute propaganda and only works if you reduce everything to the point words have no meaning and everyone who disagrees with you is an amorphous evil entity working in concert. If I buy your house it's not the same thing as killing you and taking your house just because you can reduce it to the same end-state. No matter how much you try to hem and haw about material conditions making money necessary. Media is heavily influenced by government and corporate interests, some of which is direct influence and some is indirect, but influence is not the same thing as control. That completely ignores the many many different competing interests and limitations on that influence; do you think the US government was super-keen on all the Afghanistan withdrawal coverage? Having to put in the work to influence your population to consent massively changes the scope and speed in which the government can exert direct control over people's lives, does not always work, and requires you to compete against other people with power and divergent interests. When the power is concentrated in the hands of a few (like, an actual few, not tens of millions of people that you're lumping as a class) those actions and scope are virtually unchecked. The existence of power in any form at any concentration is not casually interchangeable with authoritarianism.
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Jan 19, 2022 15:09
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Also there's an argument to be made that terms like "authoritarianism" and "totalitarianism" simply served to replace the older and more overtly racist "oriental despotism" https://twitter.com/catcontentonly/status/1473727785034301448
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Jan 19, 2022 15:10
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Jarmak posted:This is absolute propaganda and only works if you reduce everything to the point words have no meaning and everyone who disagrees with you is an amorphous evil entity working in concert. If I buy your house it's not the same thing as killing you and taking your house just because you can reduce it to the same end-state. No matter how much you try to hem and haw about material conditions making money necessary. just because capitalists sometimes fight amonst themselves doesnt mean they do not rule your world. also, what tens of millions of people are you talking about? western media is not owned by millions of people, it is owned by a few dozen. and their actions are unchecked, our rulers are indeed above the laws we have to follow
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Jan 19, 2022 15:23
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Plastic_Gargoyle posted:Which is endlessly entertaining given you're defending a system responsible for possibly the single worst man made famine in all of human history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
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Jan 19, 2022 15:24
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Something like 9 million people perish from starvation every year under the current global system of neoliberal capitalism. Thats the equivalent of the Chinese Great Famine ever 3-4 years, so I’m not sure thats the best line of argumentation for you to pursue
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Jan 19, 2022 15:32
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If you're posting on this comedy forum and poo poo on your government you are probably not living under an explicitly authoritarian regime.
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Jan 19, 2022 15:32
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Solaris 2.0 posted:If you're posting on this comedy forum and poo poo on your government you are probably not living under an explicitly authoritarian regime. why would any authoritarian government give a poo poo about what you post here? youre their supporter, not their enemy
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Jan 19, 2022 15:34
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