The emptiness of the term "authoritarian"

[PyramidHead]

Doesn’t China have a social credit system? If your score is too low then you lose rights/privileges? Saying the US and China are similarily authoritarian is ridiculous.

Maybe you should learn what that system is and how it works. Your credit score isn't tied to your ability to have a home or go to school or get a car like it is in America. It's primarily used as a mechanism to punish rich people who avoid paying their debts. It's not Black Mirror, and 15 minutes on Google will tell you everything you need to know

 

[Trausti]

Doesn’t China have a social credit system? If your score is too low then you lose rights/privileges? Saying the US and China are similarily authoritarian is ridiculous.

Maybe you should learn what that system is and how it works. Your credit score isn't tied to your ability to have a home or go to school or get a car like it is in America. It's primarily used as a mechanism to punish rich people who avoid paying their debts. It's not Black Mirror, and 15 minutes on Google will tell you everything you need to know

You really think letting the government give you a score on your social worth is a good thing? Okay if Trump scores you?

 

[PyramidHead]

Doesn’t China have a social credit system? If your score is too low then you lose rights/privileges? Saying the US and China are similarily authoritarian is ridiculous.

Maybe you should learn what that system is and how it works. Your credit score isn't tied to your ability to have a home or go to school or get a car like it is in America. It's primarily used as a mechanism to punish rich people who avoid paying their debts. It's not Black Mirror, and 15 minutes on Google will tell you everything you need to know

You really think letting the government give you a score on your social worth is a good thing? Okay if Trump scores you?

Trump is not the president of China, and what works for China will not necessarily work elsewhere. However, in China, the government tracking people's failure to pay what they owe and providing material consequences for gaming the system in one's favor is protection against people like Trump.

From WIRED of all places:

How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong

The primary mechanism of the Social Credit System are the nationwide blacklists and red lists. Each regulatory agency was asked to come up with a rap sheet of its worst offenders, businesses and individuals who violated preexisting industry regulations. The red lists are the exact opposite—they’re rosters of companies and people that have been particularly compliant. Those archives were then made public on a centralized website, called China Credit, where anyone can search them. Think of the Better Business Bureau, or letter grades given to restaurants.

Many regulatory agencies have signed memorandums of understanding with each other, in which they promise to punish people and businesses on one another’s blacklists. Hypothetically, if this system were in the US, a business might now face additional penalties from the Environmental Protection Agency for breaking a rule at the Food and Drug Administration. There’s no evidence that citizens’ social media or purchasing data is being incorporated, at least not yet. “They’re making it so that these records are communicated to other agencies,” says Daum. “Somehow, that got interpreted as everything you do is being watched all the time in a panopticon, and that I have not seen.”

Given the state of corporate dominance in all aspects of American life, and the casual hands-off approach that our justice system takes toward the most egregious offenses to the environment and the economy, I would say the Chinese are on the right track with this initiative.

 

[Worldtraveller]

Neither Loren's anecdotes nor Harry's dismissal without rebuttal are admissible in an argument about facts, so my point remains uncontested.

I think you'd have to make a point first.

But way to just declare yourself the winner. That's very trumpian of you.

 

[PyramidHead]

Neither Loren's anecdotes nor Harry's dismissal without rebuttal are admissible in an argument about facts, so my point remains uncontested.

I think you'd have to make a point first.

But way to just declare yourself the winner. That's very trumpian of you.

Do you have any evidence to dispute my rejection of Harry's claims? Or do you think that in China there are no civil rights, and nobody is allowed to criticize the government?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Neither Loren's anecdotes nor Harry's dismissal without rebuttal are admissible in an argument about facts, so my point remains uncontested.

No, you're the one using heresay testimony. We were both reporting what we've actually seen.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Doesn’t China have a social credit system? If your score is too low then you lose rights/privileges? Saying the US and China are similarily authoritarian is ridiculous.

Maybe you should learn what that system is and how it works. Your credit score isn't tied to your ability to have a home or go to school or get a car like it is in America. It's primarily used as a mechanism to punish rich people who avoid paying their debts. It's not Black Mirror, and 15 minutes on Google will tell you everything you need to know

Yet another claim that doesn't pass the laugh test.

Note the word "social"--it's about behavior as much as it is about finances. And it has a lot more power than our credit ratings.

 

[PyramidHead]

Loren, have you ever posted a link? For anything? Did you know there's a button for it?

 

[fromderinside]

Hey. Just came over to scramble things up a bit. First, the system. You know. That thing that got destroyed in the recent Impeachment episode. That process made clear to most that it's association of assembled persons running the system that determines whether and how the system works.


Now it doesn't. Absolute power is back on the table as to how 'merica will be run.

Way-ta-go.

Second the governors. Founders suspected that elected governors would attempt to gather power to themselves to their credit. The problem is there is no way to stop that. Gimmicking up proportions and terms and responsibilities didn't succeed. It hasn't succeeded for the last 150 years or so.

What is here now is a system designed to work in mostly small to medium sized farm oriented communities where industry wasn't all that important. Ain't so now. Texture of society determines how society feels, moves, and desires. Just as mores can't be foreseen by ancients, neither can social dynamics.

Will a more flexible structure help? Probably not. We should just bring level of governance down a few notches so that individuals won't succeed in grabbing power without intensive and long lasting organization.

It's a certainty that mankind is fickle. Make it actually plan and gather strength when it is fragmented to very small power centers consisting of insignificant numbers of people in each cluster would reduce the likelihood that any one group could get control of all of the many levers produced by reduction of authority and responsibility large number of groups.

IOW a growth plan for governing. A minimum number of persons in a group is desirable as the constitution people proposed. But so is a maximum number of people in any level of group. I suggest about five or six times the minimum on the presumption that power hungry persons are more or less evenly distributed in the population. So that if at least 50 power seeking people is a minimum thenabout 250 or 300 are probably the maximum any governing body would find acceptable.

Such rules would need adjustment of number of levels of governing as population increases.

We should have groupings according forms of greed. For instance land and use, money and commerce, interests and goals at the very least. Social values should be a secular thing so that anchors to ancient practices are minimized.

OK so this is more than two things.

 

[Elixir]

Hey. Just came over to scramble things up a bit. First, the system. You know. That thing that got destroyed in the recent Impeachment episode. That process made clear to most that it's association of assembled persons running the system that determines whether and how the system works.


Now it doesn't. Absolute power is back on the table as to how 'merica will be run.

Way-ta-go.

Second the governors. Founders suspected that elected governors would attempt to gather power to themselves to their credit. The problem is there is no way to stop that. Gimmicking up proportions and terms and responsibilities didn't succeed. It hasn't succeeded for the last 150 years or so.

What is here now is a system designed to work in mostly small to medium sized farm oriented communities where industry wasn't all that important. Ain't so now. Texture of society determines how society feels, moves, and desires. Just as mores can't be foreseen by ancients, neither can social dynamics.

Will a more flexible structure help? Probably not. We should just bring level of governance down a few notches so that individuals won't succeed in grabbing power without intensive and long lasting organization.

It's a certainty that mankind is fickle. Make it actually plan and gather strength when it is fragmented to very small power centers consisting of insignificant numbers of people in each cluster would reduce the likelihood that any one group could get control of all of the many levers produced by reduction of authority and responsibility large number of groups.

IOW a growth plan for governing. A minimum number of persons in a group is desirable as the constitution people proposed. But so is a maximum number of people in any level of group. I suggest about five or six times the minimum on the presumption that power hungry persons are more or less evenly distributed in the population. So that if at least 50 power seeking people is a minimum thenabout 250 or 300 are probably the maximum any governing body would find acceptable.

Such rules would need adjustment of number of levels of governing as population increases.

We should have groupings according forms of greed. For instance land and use, money and commerce, interests and goals at the very least. Social values should be a secular thing so that anchors to ancient practices are minimized.

OK so this is more than two things.

I agree that we are stuck in a valley in the evolutionary landscape; it is a state where our genetic proclivities would work to our advantage if we were living in clusters/tribes of a few hundred individuals, and all power resided on that level.
But that's not the case. Increasingly, our "tribes" are outsized, artificially bound groups that consist of individuals who can and do turn on each other without hesitation when even minor changes happen to the niche we live in. It's a hot mess, and the likely outcome will be a precipitous decline in human population in the not too distant future.
On the upside, as barbos points out, if coronavirus fatalities continue to double every few days, we'll be extinct before election day!

 

[PyramidHead]

Dictatorship and authority are just synonyms for control of one person/population by another. So, a society like the United States, where a small minority of rich people have a disproportionately large share of political, economic, cultural, and media influence over the vast majority, is no less authoritarian or dictatorial simply because the majority are given the right to vote or to surf Google. It is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which uses its dominance over the productive forces everybody needs to survive as a weapon against the majority, who must sell their labor power to subsist on what they create. As long as this antagonism exists at the base of society, a state is necessary to manage it, and that is exactly what the state exists to do in the US.

However, my point is that all states exist for this purpose; without class divisions, there is no need for a state other than for banal administrative functions.

So, the states that are commonly invoked as authoritarian are simply those where the balance of class power has flipped, so that the capitalists are no longer the dominant class and are instead the object of state oppression. It's no different from what happened following the abolition of slavery, or the downfall of feudal monarchy. When the slave owners lost their position as the ruling class, the state was no longer their weapon but the weapon used against them. The feudal lords did not retain the power of state authority over their subjects after the French revolution, and were instead subjected to state authority by the newly emerging bourgeoisie. In all of these cases, the formerly oppressed class became the oppressor class, and there were always voices accusing them of being too authoritarian, too dictatorial; these reactionary voices are what became the conservative movement in global politics, to which perhaps 99% of this forum belongs ideologically. The roots of reactionary conservatism are obvious and transparent, and gave birth to the self-righteous accusations of authoritarianism that characterize Western coverage of non-Western societies.