• GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      I think it’s probably better to simply say that “authoritarian” is a buzzword, though your implied argument that all states work by exerting authority on (at least some portion of) their population is certainly true. Anyone who uses a term like “authoritarian” rather than even a marginally more-descriptive negative term like, idk, “bureaucratic” or “state capitalist” (which gets misused, but I digress) is immediately demonstrating themselves to have untrustworthy judgement on the topic

      • IzyaKatzmann [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        maybe bring back totalitarian and use it against countries like the US? have a word that, like Huey P. Newton said regarding coining the term ‘pig’ for police, “highlights the contradiction”, in this case, between the selective usage of a word and it’s inherent meaning, none of which is understandable without contradictions from a prescriptive linguistic context

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Authoritarianism was a bullshit term invented by child-fucker libertarians to frame themselves as being the good guys.

        • cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          the state maintains that this is a moral and legitimate use of force: that it has the authority to do this.

          I don’t necessarily agree with “moral”. In western democracies laws and use of force doesn’t legitimize itself by a call to morality usually. Just using some kind of authority, doesn’t make a government authoritarian by any common definition of the word.

            • cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              It absolutely does imo, it legitimises itself through an appeal to an underlying moral framework.

              Yes, but very indirectly. We don’t have a “moral police”, but one that enforces laws which are, as you say, legitimized by the people as a sovereign.

              So you don’t see police stopping people on “moral grounds” in some vague interpretation.