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My favorite of those…

It was 20 or so years ago, on the old IMDb forums (IMDb used to have some general interest forums).

It wasn’t actually that it was going well until it flipped - the poster was actually already notorious for arguing in bad faith. But even with that, it was so remarkable that I’ve never forgotten it.

Essentially what happened was, I was arguing “A” and he was arguing “B”. We had gone back and forth for a while, and he had backed himself into a corner, and I moved in for the kill. I wrote a response - a near-perfect bit of argumentation that directly quoted and directly and entirely refuted him, and there was no possible way he could wriggle out of it - then I posted it and sat back, knowing that even someone as dishonest as he was couldn’t get out if it.

Then after a bit, he responded and said essentially, “Then you admit that A is right, as I’ve been claiming all along!”

Yes - he actually, when faced with an argument he couldn’t refute, spontaneously switched sides and claimed that he’d been arguing my position all along, and therefore I had just proven that he was correct and therefore, somehow, that I was wrong.

That’s when I blocked him.

Pet the cat.

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“Authoritarian” is fairly meaningless in this context. All societies and political structures rely on authority to maintain social control to greater or lesser extents.

“Authoritarian” doesn’t refer merely to the existence of authority. It refers to a system under which, on balance, individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority - a system under which there is more likelihood that an individual will be constrained by authority than that theybwill be free to act as they choose.

And note, before you even go there, that that doesn’t mean or imply no individual liberty. Again, the issue is the balance between individual liberty and governmental authority.

Where does liberal “democracy” derive its authority from?

Why are we suddenly talking about democracy?

Why then do studies repeatedly show that there is no correlation between popular opinion and policy? Why do the majority of Americans want public health care and yet it never passes?

Why are we now suddenly talking about representative “democracy” instead?

Yes - of course there’s a gap between actual public sentiment and the machinations of representatuve "democracy - that’s most of the point. It’s a system that’s been sold to the unwary to give them an illusion of self-determination behind which the oligarchs can hide.

How is that relevant to anything? (Other than a broad argument against institutionalized authority in general, which I’d agree with).

There is no such thing as a distinction between “democracy” and “authoritarian”

Not necessarily, but as a general rule, there is, simply because it’s more difficult for oligarchs in a representative democracy to enact their will. There’s a number of hoops that they have to jump through in order to maintain at least some semblance of serving the will of the people, and that specifically because the people still retain some significant freedoms (remember - it’s about the balance between freedom and authority).

In effect, oligarchs in a representative democracy have to trick or coerce people into not exercising their freedoms or exercising them poorly.

In an authoritarian system, the balance favors the government in the first place, so they’re far more likely to be able to simply issue decrees and then enforce them, without having to muck about with all of the pretending to be serving the will of the people stuff.

Granted that it’s not as significant a difference as gung-ho Americans might wish to believe it to be, there is still a difference.

Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing

Actually, I would say that it is inherently a bad thing.

That’s an awful lot of why I’m an anarchist - I believe that institutionalized authority cannot be justified and is inevitably destructive.

But that’s sort of beside the point.

People always justify the use of authoritarian means used by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn’t “authoritarian”.

This reads like classic projection.

And in fact, I just wrote another post in which I pointed to what I believe to be the fundamental flaw at the heart of the tankie position, and it was pretty much exactly what you wrote here.

My position is that if you’re going to hold that authority is legitimate, then that means that you are legitimately subject to it. You don’t get to pick and choose, just as you wouldn’t allow those who would be subject to your authority pick and choose. Just as you hold that they’re rightly subjugated if those with whom you agree are in power, you’re rightly subjugated if those with whom they agree are in power.

It’s either that or you carry your aversion to being made subject to someone else’s authority to its logical conclusion and cede to others the exact same freedom you wish to have yourself.

You can’t have it both ways. You’re not some sort of demi-god, deserving of special treatment. If you can rightly oppress others they can rightly oppress you. If they can’t rightly oppress you, you can’t rightly oppress them.

That last is the main reason I’m an anarchist.

Oh and, more broadly I’d note that virtually all authoritarians believe that authority should be directed in a specific way. That’s exactly how their irrationality manifests - they don’t advocate for authority broadly, because that carries with it the risk that they might end up subject to someone else’s authority. They advocate only for their own authority, or for that of their ideological fellows.

So what that boils down to is that they explicitly advocate for visiting on other people that which they explicitly oppose being visited on themselves.

Or in simpler terms, they’re self-centered assholes.

I’m not an anarchist by accident.

That’s exactly why it’s cynically amusing - because they “believe it should be directed in a certain way.”

Specifically, they’re entirely on-board when someone who happens to wear the same ideological label they do uses it to, for instance, massacre “dissidents,” but the instant anyone else uses it in any way that causes some minor inconvenience for themselves, they start mewling about how oppressed they are.

Ah… it’s so deliciously cynically amusing to watch tankies whine about being subject to someone else’s authority.

A tankie is a communist who at least defends and often advocates for forced submission to their rule, or more broadly defends the authoritarian regimes that engage in such. It dates back to the USSR sending in tanks to crush an uprising in Hungary in 1956, and was applied to the UK communists who argued in support of the USSR.

The owners of lemmy.ml are tankies.

Actually, I think it’s amusingly perfect that the tankies were hyperfocused on conjectural threats posed by capitalists and entirely missed the much more imminent threat posed by a government.