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I remember seeing some bozo post this bullshit in the olden days.
Authoritarian highly racist dictatorship
Neo-liberal (conservative lite) that wants to give you health care
Authoritarian highly racist dictatorship
One of these things is not like the others. I’d say that nuance is lost on people that make memes like these, but it’s not even a nuance or subtle difference. It’s a straight up lie, at best it’s willful ignorance.
Horseshoe theory is bullshit, but it definitely works on the authoritarian side of the spectrum.
Facists and totalitarian so called “communists” are eerily similar.
But if you start including non-totalitarian socialism the horseshoe thing stops working.
That's because authoritarianism isnt an idealology outside of authority worship, it just hijacks the surrounding culture, reclaims it for itself, and transforms all symbols into meaningless team colors. Notice how trump supporters say they represent democracy and freedom despite being opposed to it. Or how christion authoritarians throw around Jesus's name without understanding a word he ever said. Or how Stalinists insist that they're left leaning communists despite cheering for the tanks that crush their comrades. This pattern continues worldwide and affects every nationality and religion.
Authoritarians dont have principles. They have loyalty only, they cannot comprehend non-loyalty principled thinking, and so they see symbols only as a team identifier.
Political compasses dont work for principled worldviews, because principled worldviews cant be graphed on axes. It's just a horoscope effect. Principled worldviews are distinct like pokemon types are. They have to be individually studied to be understood. It is not possible to extrapolate from your first beleif system.
It's because the spectrum and axis are ultimately bullshit. It's a space with too many dimensions to make a useful 2D chart. And ideas are often discrete, not continuous.
and yet all information displayed here are one-dimensional.
Be the change
i found out early on, that on the web all argument spaces can only collapse. <insert event-horizon analogy here.>
I don’t think it’s necessarily bullshit as long as one is looking at the overall result. Authoritarianism, tyrants, and dictatorships are what they are, it doesn’t matter much which end of the horseshoe they ended up on. The differences are minimal, it’s what the people are told they’re (not) actually getting by the dictator that makes the difference. Are they getting socialism via communism, or are they getting socialism via a dictator? Maybe some theocratic sprinkles to spice things up?
I mean, the point of the ends of the horseshoe is that they’re pretty much the same, if you haven’t reached the extreme of totalitarianism or dictatorship or whatever, you haven’t got the horseshoe yet.
How do radical ideologies (as percieved by the current status quo) that are non-authoritarian fit in then.
Say some indigenous groups which had social systems similar to what westerners might call anarcho-communism.
I'm not sure that such a situation applies? IMO the horseshoe was intended to compare large scale negative extremes and such small-scale tribal groups don't really fit the idea. The point is that the extremes are more similar to each other than the middle, not that a tribal council that favored communist features in governance should be considered an extreme.