'Lemmitor' is too much like 'Redditor'. Why not something reflecting how Lemmy is better than Reddit, like ... Lemmyst?
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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If only the real world was a straight line, and there were nothing such as authoritarian coopting of collective efforts, resembling right wing fascist authoritarian, wearing the corpse of an attempted social movement.
Why animal farm exists
Why the 'national socialists' came for the communists and socialists first.
You're representing a high dimensional ecosystem with oversimplified boundings being flattened into a linear scale, and the 'horseshoe' is moreso adapting the simple heuristic to better represent the more complicated reality.
Sometimes the meaning of words is opportunistically changed, or the people directing a group change, and we actually have to comprehend and adapt to that.
A better representation of the political system is like a body where a bunch of organs seem to think cancer might be the best shape to be. Cancer as in 'defining wider boundings of surrounding systems as exploitable environment' usually ignoring how the surrounding body is literally necessary for sustaining life for the cancer itself. This is also where we would talk about things like instrumental convergence in natural/human systems.
So the linear line doesn't really explain the constant rugged individualism usurping spaces in our complex high dimensional social reality. Ergo horseshoe heuristic.
Animal Farm is a fictional narrative based off George Orwell's interpretations of the events surrounding the Russian revolution, not an accurate piece of political history or theory.
History is much more accurately depicted through nonfiction texts, not fictional narratives. You should read actual political theory if you want to learn about the Russian revolution. It was a very interesting event with many complexities and it liberated so many people.
Although I do agree with some of your later points. Although I think horseshoe theory is unjustified as well, and you seem to agree. Politics is much more complex than a line or even a bent line.
Politics is a complex web of ideas that form as a result of certain conditions. The far left and far right do share some values, but usually for completely different reasons. For example both Nazi Germany and the USSR had very strong centralisation of power in the state, although that power in the USSR stemmed from the workers to oppress the bourgeoisie but in Nazi Germany the power stemmed from the Bourgeoisie to oppress the working class.
i just enjoy the use of animal farm/1984 as little heuristic environments to convey simple ways that collective efforts are derailed, with a great simple short set of events that show how a movement can be slowly converted into something antithetical to the original collective effort.
a problem that still hasn't been solved, despite any elaboration that could be had on the specific happenings in the USSR.
i care about the heuristics because they do map really well to other and current happenings, in ways that are useful for framing to people things such as the decades of neoliberal progressive rugpulling, or how the heritage foundation and types have been slowly reshaping the environment to benefit them, in a recursive corruption of existing systems.
it's definitely more complicated than shown in animal-farm, but people already react as if this is the deep-end, and trying to copy and paste a textbook on USSR specifics would also have me back explaining the difference between patterns and substrate, which honestly shouldn't be the case with animal farm, but it seems even (american?) leftists seem to have read it as 'commuism bad.'
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