Authoritarianism in the 2020s

Post Reply
User avatar
Tero
Just saying
Posts: 49852
Joined: Sun Jul 04, 2010 9:50 pm
About me: 15-32-25
Location: USA
Contact:

Authoritarianism in the 2020s

Post by Tero » Tue Jan 14, 2025 11:59 am

Anne Appelbaum
Applebaum begins by looking at an obscure politician in Romania that to the surprise of everyone won a recent presidential election in that country. The results were eventually disallowed when evidence appeared that his election had been influenced by Russian cyber misinformation.

"This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him."

Georgescu took all kinds of strange positions. He opposed further Romanian assistance to Ukraine, a next door neighbor.

Applebaum isn't just focused on Romanian politics but uses Georgescu as an example of similar politicians that are gaining support in other European countries and has similarities to some of the people that are taking roles in Trump's new administration such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others.

"When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear."

"Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.)

"Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too."

"By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill."
www.theatlantic.com
https://karireport.blogspot.com/
International disaster, gonna be a blaster
Gonna rearrange our lives
International disaster, send for the master
Don't wait to see the white of his eyes
International disaster, international disaster
Price of silver droppin' so do yer Christmas shopping
Before you lose the chance to score (Pembroke)

User avatar
JimC
The sentimental bloke
Posts: 73758
Joined: Thu Feb 26, 2009 7:58 am
About me: To be serious about gin requires years of dedicated research.
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Contact:

Re: Authoritarianism in the 2020s

Post by JimC » Tue Jan 14, 2025 9:13 pm

Rings true...
Nurse, where the fuck's my cardigan?
And my gin!

User avatar
Tero
Just saying
Posts: 49852
Joined: Sun Jul 04, 2010 9:50 pm
About me: 15-32-25
Location: USA
Contact:

Re: Authoritarianism in the 2020s

Post by Tero » Sun Jan 19, 2025 7:30 pm

Toxic males decade:
Guardian
I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... uch-losers
https://karireport.blogspot.com/
International disaster, gonna be a blaster
Gonna rearrange our lives
International disaster, send for the master
Don't wait to see the white of his eyes
International disaster, international disaster
Price of silver droppin' so do yer Christmas shopping
Before you lose the chance to score (Pembroke)

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 22 guests