Mastodawn

“Authoritarian state” is a bullshit category. Authoritarian states are just states insufficiently subservient to Washington. It’s no more or less coherent than “terrorist state,” which the US uses in the same way.

“Authoritarianism” is the contemporary word for “totalitarianism,” which is just an erudite-seming term for horseshoe theory, which is horseshit. Previously:

‘Horseshoe theory’ is nonsense – the far right and far left have little in common
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory#Academic_s…
Funny thing about Hannah Arendt’s construction of “totalitarianism”: She came from a bourgeois family and so was unsurprisingly anti-communist, and she was funded & promoted by the CIA.
Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism
One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front. Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world. Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

The best thing you can do for the fediverse is just be kind - Lemmy

The fediverse is small, and thats both a blessing and a curse - one of its several blessings is that in a smaller space we all individually have a bigger impact on what the culture of this space is like. On this comm (and on lemmy broadly) there’s a lot of discussion about how to grow the fediverse, what to improve, but an easy thing you can do for the fediverse is right in front of us- * Be kind * Ask people what they think, and why * Approach folks you disagree with with curiosity rather than hostility (EDIT: no, this is not specifically referring to Nazis. I get it, they’re the first thing that comes to mind. I’m not telling you to approve of Nazis I’m just saying be kind to your fellow lemmites) * Engage sincerely * Ask yourself if there’s something nice you can say * Make this small space worth being in A platform lives or dies by what’s available on said platform and often we have this conversation in the context of “content” or posts - and we may never have as much content as reddit does. But content and posts aren’t the only thing this kind of platform offers- it also offers people. It offers community, and human interaction. Culture and community is lemmy and the fediverse’s biggest differentiator, and we all have a role to play in shaping the culture of this space. The biggest thing you can do to help the fediverse is make it a place worth being.