#autocrats

[tomorrowusa]

Trump's use of violent rhetoric for the past nine years is disturbing and has the potential to incite unbalanced and extremist elements in this country. But if he is using it to frighten us or coerce us into doing or not doing something, then we shouldn't take the bait.

We should not at all fear a Trump loss this year. While it won't solve all our problems, it would remove the greatest threat to American democracy since the 1940s from politics and throw what remains of the GOP into disarray.

While we should worry about the potential catastrophe of a second Trump administration, Donald Trump himself is not high on my list of people personally to be feared. He's an orange bag of pus with a big porcine mouth and bad hair. Birds would just poop on him if he were a scarecrow in the middle of a farm field.

Dictators and wannabe dictators are always making violent threats. For example: Vladimir Putin threatens to nuke us every 3 to 6 months. Putin somehow wants us to think that he's the only person in the world with nuclear weapons.

But caving to threats from autocrats almost always does more harm than good in the long run. If France and Britain had stood up to Hitler when he threatened Czechoslovakia in 1938, there may not have been World War II in 1939.

If we resolve to vote and don't get distracted by third party vanity candidates, Trump's political career will end later this year and his residency in a federal facility – other than the White House – will probably begin next year. Trump is trying to create fear in others because he's afraid of what will happen to him if he can't manage to hijack the 2024 election.

#donald trump #trump's violent rhetoric #bloodbath #fear #autocrats #dictators #lawrence o'donnell #register and vote #election 2024 #vote blue no matter who #Youtube

[azspot]

Trump has used ritual humiliation and divide and rule to make the GOP his personal tool. His administration had a record 68% turnover of high-level positions and the list of Republicans he has mocked publicly is long. In classic autocratic tradition, the more loyalty Republicans show Trump, sticking with him through impeachments, indictments, and a coup attempt that sent them running for their lives, the more he scorns them, losing few opportunities to cut them down. Nothing they can do, even undermine their power as GOP candidates by pledging support for him, a rival candidate, on live television during the first GOP debate, can make them immune from this treatment.

Ritual Humiliation: The Favorite Sport of Autocrats

#autocrats

[keithanime]

It is ironic that autocratic leaders are often called "strongmen" when in fact they cannot tolerate dissent or even allow a level playing field.

Amal Clooney - Foreword to Maria Ressa’s book, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator”

#amal clooney #Maria Ressa #how to stand up to a dictator #autocracy #autocrat #autocrats #autocratic leader

[blogjeepster]

#globalization #globalizations #globalized #global leader #global literature #globally #globalised #globalisation #global influence #global heating #global force #global couplings #dictators #despots #authoritarians #fuehrers #autocrats #caesars #tyrannizers #pharaohs #absolutists #strongmen #Hitlers #oppressors #totalitarians #men on horseback #fascists #overlords #leaders #monocrats

[onenakedfarmer]

MASHA GESSEN New York Times Review of Books, Nov 26, 2016

Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: Humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable.

#autocrats #fascism #GOP #MAGA #MAGAts #Masha Gessen #quotes

[uboat53]

Well, after years of outright lies, half-truths, and omissions out of the Russian government, here is a statement that, as far as I can tell, is entirely true (SHORT RANT (TM) ahead):

"[W]e are at war not so much with Ukraine and the Ukrainian army as with the collective West. At this point we are really at war with the collective West, with NATO." -- Sergei Shoigu, Russian Minister of Defense

This statement is worth analyzing because I believe it is entirely true. Understanding what he means will mean a greater understanding of what the next several decades, perhaps even the next half-century, will look like.

So yeah, Russia's attack on Ukraine, not just the most recent one but all of their bellicose actions back to and even before their 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Donbass, is actually an attack on NATO, the west, and the very concept of western values such as individual liberty and liberal democratic governance.

These values threaten authoritarian and autocratic governments like Vladimir Putin's Russia and Xi Xinping's China among others. Putin's moves against Ukraine have all been motivated by a desire to suppress the rising embrace of western governance and values by the people and government of that country.

Ukraine is particularly important to Russia in this regard because of the close connections, linguistically, culturally, historically, and personally, between people in Ukraine and people in Russia. This closeness means that ideas that spread in Ukraine are also likely to spread to Russia, this is the reason that Putin has acted aggressively in ways that the leaders of other authoritarian countries have not.

But that doesn't mean that this will continue to be an isolated event. The fact that other authoritarian countries are not currently threatened by cultural ties to populations that are beginning to embrace these kinds of western ideals does not mean that they won't be in the future. In fact, we already see China building up its military capacity for a likely assault on the island of Taiwan.

This is similar to the conflict that we faced in the Cold War, though even more drawn on ideological lines. The conflict in the Cold War was largely defined along the lines of economic systems; communism and capitalism; the state control of industry vs the free market. The conflict now seems to be different, a conflict of systems of governance. Autocratic governance pitted against, not democracy, but liberal democracy, democratic governance but with strong protections for individual rights.

And that last is important. An autocratic or authoritarian government can exist in a democracy. What western values truly mean in this context is a respect for individual liberties, the right of individuals to protest and even oppose the government short of violence if they wish. It is a society in which the government itself cannot use its powers over society to privilege the views of those in power or punish the views of those who oppose them.

Those who have been listening to the rhetoric of authoritarian leaders such as Xi Xinping, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, or even the leaders of more open countries such as Jair Bolsonaro or Donald Trump will have noticed that they have increasingly crossed the line in terms of using the power of their governments to promote their own views and suppress those that oppose them over the past decade.

In my view, this will likely be the defining conflict of the next several decades. When the Cold War ended, liberal democracy, free market economics, and the countries that practiced and promoted them were ascendant, that is no longer the case. The rise of China in particular has shifted the balance of global ideology and created a powerful actor devoted to autocracy. It may be that it is possible to avoid further direct conflict between the major powers involved in this conflict, but I do not believe that this conflict of interests will be settled amicably anytime in the next several years.

The conflict in Ukraine, then, is genuinely as the Russian Minister of Defense says it is; a conflict between autocracy and liberal democracy. It is important, then, that those of us in the west who believe in the values of individual rights and liberties as well as representative government commit to supporting Ukraine. The conflict is likely to be long and grinding and there will be a good deal of suffering and bloodshed before it is finished, but if we do not then autocratic nations will be encouraged to attack their neighbors and suppress individual rights and liberties anywhere in the world in order to preserve their own autocracies at home.

That's not a world I want to live in, I hope I'm not alone in that regard.

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/time-come-top-putin-official-201022301.html

#short rant (tm) #politics #us politics #international politics #liberal democracy #autocracy #autocrats #russia ukraine putin #russia #russia ukraine war #putin ukraine #vladimir putin #xi xinping #china #united states of america #united states #nato

[marielouisebosinma]

#nationalists #autocrats #maga men #Maga women

[worldofwardcraft]

Autocratophiliac.

March 18, 2024

Someone really should come up with a word for a person with an extreme affinity for dictators. Because mob boss Donald Trump's certainly a prime example. Trump's longtime regard for Russian president and war criminal Vlad Putin is already infamous.

Back in 2013, Trump told Larry King that Putin did “a really great job outsmarting our country.” Campaigning in 2016, Trump asserted during a televised town hall, "I've already said, he is really very much of a leader." And only two years ago, he described Putin’s vicious and illegal invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy.”

But Putin's not the only brutal tyrant Trump esteems. A year ago on Faux News, Trump babbled on and on about China's tyrannical president Xi Jinping.

Think of President Xi. Central casting, brilliant guy. You know, when I say he’s brilliant, everyone says, "Oh that’s terrible." Well, he runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Smart, brilliant, everything perfect. There’s nobody in Hollywood like this guy.

Then there's North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Following a meeting with Kim in Singapore, Trump gushed, “I learned he’s a very talented man. I also learned that he loves his country very much.” And don't forget the "love letters" Trump exchanged with Kim. "No really. He wrote me beautiful letters,” Trump cooed in 2018. “They were great letters. And then we fell in love.”

Only last week, Trump invited Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán to visit him (the two pictured above as BFF twinsies). During a fete at Mar-a-Lago, Trump burbled, “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán.” And added, “He’s the boss and he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”

Plus, unsurprisingly, Trump once told John Kelly, his chief of staff, that Hitler "did some good things." So why does Trump have this strange affection for authoritarian despots? Here's what John Bolton, his former national security advisor, told CNN news anchor Jim Sciutto:

He views himself as a big guy. He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.

Trump has already admitted that, if elected president again, he'd like to become "a dictator on day one," put people in concentration camps and "terminate the Constitution." Says Kelly, “My theory on why he likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is.” And that's the word on Donald Trump.

#trump and putin #autocrats #trump as king

[tomorrowusa]

From Belarusian journalist @TadeuszGiczan on Twitter. (caption added! 😉)

Putin may think he’s Peter the Great, but he’s more like a cross between Leonid Brezhnev and the Nazis from The Producers.

If you need any more proof of Putin’s delusions of grandeur, then his comments comparing himself to a Russian tsar provide additional material.

One thing Putin does have in common with autocratic tsars and with Joseph Stalin is his willingness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russians to promote his dubious personal glory.

Russians need to wake up and overthrow him the way the 1917 revolution got rid of the last tsar.

#vladimir putin #delusions of grandeur #peter the great #imperialism #autocrats #tadeusz giczan #владимир путин #пётр великий #царь #мания величия #самодержец #дурак #россия #путин хуйло #руки прочь от украины!

[xtruss]

How To Rig An Election! Rather Than Crudely Stuffing Ballot Boxes, Autocrats Will Cheat in Hundreds of Less Obvious Ways

— November 13th, 2023

Image: Ben Denzer. Three Paper Ballot Boxes Sequentially Getting More Crushed

Men rise to great fortune “more through fraud than through force”, argued Niccolo Machiavelli, a 16th-century adviser to unscrupulous princes. Modern potentates can find similar advice in “How to Rig an Election”, a book by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas. “In many countries around the world the art of retaining power has become the art of electoral manipulation,” argue the two academics (who, to be clear, do not approve).

Only a handful of autocratic regimes, such as China 🇨🇳 and Eritrea 🇪🇷, dispense with elections entirely. Most at least pretend to offer voters a choice, while making sure the opposition cannot win. It is a shrewd strategy. Regimes that practise what Mr Cheeseman and Mr Klaas call “counterfeit democracy” tend to last longer than pure dictatorships. Holding elections makes them seem more legitimate, so they are less likely to be ostracised internationally. And allowing an opposition gives them someone to demonise.

Several elections in 2024 will illustrate this sad truth. In some cases, the deception will be obvious. Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda 🇷🇼, won 99% of the vote last time, so it is safe to say he will be re-elected in August. In Mali 🇲🇱 elections due in February were delayed for “technical reasons”. Voting is impossible in jihad-racked parts of the country and few expect the junta that seized power in 2021 to step aside.

“Only a Handful of Autocratic Regimes Dispense with Elections Entirely”

Most election-riggers are more subtle. They want to cheat just enough to win, but not so much that their country’s reputation takes a nose-dive. Rather than crudely stuffing ballot boxes on election day, they try to tilt the playing field beforehand, in various ways.

This starts with steps that are not directly tied to elections, such as handsomely paying the police and army to ensure their loyalty, co-opting judges, turning the public broadcaster into a propaganda megaphone and hounding watchdog groups into bankruptcy with meritless tax probes. Some leaders deploy convoluted legal arguments to evade term limits, as in El Salvador 🇸🇻 and Russia 🇷🇺.

All this sets the scene for stage two: nobbling the election itself. By fiddling with electoral boundaries, rulers can make opposition votes count for less. By not updating the electoral roll, they can keep dead people registered—and the dead generally vote for the ruling party. Permits for opposition rallies will take months to process; ruling-party rallies proceed without a hitch. Some regimes quietly sponsor bogus opposition candidates to split the anti-incumbent vote. Expect plenty of this in Russia in 2024.

Real opposition parties are kept off balance with a thousand bureaucratic shoves. In Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 in 2023, strict but selectively enforced limits on campaign spending, combined with a sudden 20-fold increase in registration fees for candidates, left the opposition with little cash for campaigning, while the president swanned around in a helicopter. On election day itself, a mysterious shortage of ballot papers in opposition strongholds forced voters to queue until the small hours. No such delays afflicted ruling-party strongholds, where ferocious “volunteers” (who actually worked for the security services) sat outside polling booths checking ids and conducting an “exit poll” to make sure everyone voted for the president. All these tricks will be copied by others in 2024.

Popular opposition candidates are often barred from running for office—it is astonishing how many can’t seem to fill in their paperwork properly. Some are locked up; not for political reasons, of course, but for ordinary crimes such as fraud—one of the charges for which Alexey Navalny is serving 30 years in Russia. Rahul Gandhi, the main opposition leader in India 🇮🇳, was sentenced to prison for defamation in 2023 and barred from political office; he managed to get the ruling suspended in time for the world’s biggest-ever election in 2024, but it wasted months that could have been spent campaigning.

If Bangladesh 🇧🇩 were to hold a fair election in 2024, the opposition led by Khaleda Zia would probably win. But Ms Zia is under house arrest after being convicted of corruption, and the ruling party is expected to triumph. The last time Belarus 🇧🇾 held a presidential election, the wife of a disbarred and jailed opposition leader almost certainly won by a wide margin, but the incumbent despot Alexander Lukashenko says she didn’t, and he has both guns and Vladimir Putin on his side. The next election, in February 2024, will be “fair, unlike elections in the United States”, Mr Lukashenko says.

Many people fret that technology—especially ai—will make election-rigging easier. The volume and verisimilitude of fake videos of opposition leaders doing unspeakable things will surely increase in 2024, and that may sway some voters, especially in countries with low literacy and declining press freedom, such as India 🇮🇳 and Pakistan 🇵🇰. But ruling parties already had ample tools to spread disinformation, so the effect may be marginal.

Institutions matter more. In a country with ingrained democratic habits and robust checks and balances, it is hard for a leader to alter the result, as the United States 🇺🇸 discovered in 2020. For institutions to survive, however, voters need to care about them. If, in 2024, Americans re-elect the man who tried to overturn the 2020 election, they will have to live with the consequences. ■

— Robert Guest, Deputy Editor, The Economist. This article appeared in the International section of the print edition of The World Ahead 2024 under the headline “Distorting Democracy”

#Election #Rigging #Autocrats #The Economist #Robert Guest Deputy Editor The Economist #Distorting Democracy

[sublimeobservationarcade]

The Importance Of Truth

Some commentators have referred to the current clime as a post-truth world. Influential leaders like Putin and Trump have spent years casting gazillions of fake news aspersions and stories into the mix to undermine the credibility of any concepts of truth.  The importance of truth has, indeed, never been greater. In an age of convenience, many people are, it seems, happy to believe whatever fits…

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#America #autocrats #Biden #democracy #First Nations #Indigenous Australians #Naomi Klein #post-truth world #Putin #Russia #Trump #truth #voice referendum

[alicemccombs]

The “Everyone’s a slave except their small inner circle” reality. 👎

#Techno-Oligarch Reality #autocrats #Musk #Thiel #Zuckerberg #Andreessen

[mysticdragon3md3]

How Revolutions Really Work by Hello Future Me

#video essays #analysis #history #writing references #systems #revolutions #dictators #autocrats #Youtube #worldbuilding #instability #power

[gwydionmisha]

#Donald Trump #Autocrats #News

[fashionfotorecccluse]

Eventually, ALL dicktators are protecting their arse, really!

#TransitionScrewed #ClimateChangeDeniers #Autocrats #Fascists #IncompetentGoverning #StupidPeople #ComplacentPeople

[sheri42]

The Bad Guys

#clmooc #smallpoems The Opening

Daily Note Every day, a photograph, a poem. I’m not feeling well today. Well, as in not hopeful. I see the New York Times “both sides” everything. I see CNN now a right wing spewer of whatever the GOP wants heard. I see right wing billionaires aiding the fascist party. I see the every day man beaten to a pulp by cops while the billionaires destroying our republic get away with it. I once…

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#clmooc #autocrats #Civil Rights #civility #climate change #Great America #human rights #humanity #poem #poetry #poetry22 #Slice of Life