andrewducker | Interesting Links for 02-10-2021

Left-wing authoritarianism: One more trait I expect they have in problem-- difficulty telling the difference between a prediction and a current truth.

I don't doubt that it exists. I just doubt that it's meant to be more than a distraction from the worst real-worlds threats active at this moment.

Agree.

I dislike this article's lack of explanation about the severity of consequences. Suppose Group A enforces a particular view by outlawing its practice and imprisoning (or killing) its proponents. Suppose Group B wants to enforce its opposite view by allowing the practice and even simultaneously allowing (not proscribing by law) the ostracization of its opponents. Group A is not ethically equivalent to Group B as authoritarian simply because they are on the opposite ends of a political spectrum.

For example, the U.S. government once required the firing of homosexuals. Now, maybe some homophobes are losing their jobs (I would want to know if it was due to behavioral outburst versus merely voicing opinions outside of work), but that is not even close to the same moral situation.

I think they're making a false equivalence by ignoring how each side proposes to treat its detractors.

Lots of left authoritarians have also been horribly homophobic in their policies.

Homosexuality was illegal for pretty much the whole existence of the USSR, for instance.

That probably should have been their early warning signal that they were not pursuing the ideal of socialism? ("Collective ownership, yes... but not by your kind.") I figure most people didn't figure it out until they realized that there was still a caste of haves and have-nots, that the common citizen still didn't have any real influence on decisions or goals, and elite figures were still absorbing wealth and power from the system. Similarly, one warning in the USA was when the Democratic National Committee argued in court that they are under no obligation to democratically choose their own candidate. *ding*ding*ding*

An institution should be reclassified by observers when it stops acting in accordance with its own defined terms. USSR wasn't socialist. DNC isn't democratic. And neither is the USA any more.

Now, the really interesting bit from my perspective is that this corruption could be a common failure mode (a corruption, not a culmination) of liberal government. How is a democratic machine corrupted into an authoritarian machine? Does any system with layers of representation have the same fault because of its increasingly concentrated and isolated decision authority? More importantly, how do its citizens wrest control back to a liberal framework from within the corrupt system? "Sure, you can vote... from among the people and platforms that we approve."

It depends entirely on where you are, and which of them happens to have greater access to the levers of power there. And of course, most of the world's polities don't operate on anything like a Western-style left-right axis, so trying to analyse them in those terms is likely to be have misleading results anyway.

Edited 2021-10-03 09:04 (UTC)

Interesting Links for 02-10-2021

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