ideology epitome of incomprehensibility I was talking to Dad in the kitchen a few days ago, saying, "I think Hannah Arendt's mistake in The Origins of Totalitarianism is that an authoritarian government has to have an explicit ideology. I'm not sure it needs one. A dictator might just want to control stuff, simple as that." The context: Dad had been talking about Putin and Russia. Now he said, "Putin does have an ideology, though it might not be obvious - the idea that Russia has a separate identity from the 'West' and 'East' (i.e. the rest of Asia) that needs to be protected." "Yes, but Hannah Arendt argued that a totalitarian leader needs an all-encompassing ideology. Something that people have to believe in above everything, like the idea of racial purity in Nazism or the infallibility of the Party in authoritarian communism. And you don't have that in Russia today. Maybe in North Korea, with everything being about the great leader." And then I argued against myself, going, "But Arendt also said that Mussolini wasn't totalitarian, so I guess she meant a specific thing by totalitarian, so it wasn't just any authoritarian government." ...And I guess Prof. Coskan-Johnson's criticism of Arendt, even as she called the book important, WAS the potential fuzziness of that distinction. At the time, I might have thought she was saying what other people had said, that Arendt's problem was making the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany sound too similar. Now I'm thinking it was more about the definition of "totalitarian." Because why say e.g. Mussolini wasn't totalitarian? Why is the distinction between "totalitarian" and "merely dictatorial" important? I mean, sure, you can say Mussolini was never as bad as Hitler and Stalin (specifically Stalin, since the other Soviet Union leaders weren't as oppressive). But that could sweep under the rug the harm that he did not just to his own country, but also to Ethiopia. Yeah, he didn't set up racism as an ideological cornerstone, but he did launch an unjustified invasion into an African country and use many people there as basically slave laborers for the benefit of what he wanted to be the new Roman Empire. (Why did so many countries want to be the Roman Empire?) ... This is probably a little muddled, even as I made my dialogue sound more exalted and less "um, um, like, like." But that was the substance of our discussion, and some thoughts related to ten_years_ago, Brock, history_department, the_case_of_Ezra_Pound, etc. 220521 ... e_o_i Different topic, but what's up with the idea of "gender ideology" as something new and bad? 1) Can an idea as specific as "gender is related to but distinct from physical sex" even be called an ideology? It doesn't seem like a whole worldview. And even if you insist that gender is an ideology because the definition is disconnected from reality - i.e., an abstraction - since when do humans not generalize? By that token, love is an ideology. Dancing is an ideology. Cake is an ideology. 2) Second, is the above definition of gender new? Not according to https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender. It comes from how various languages' grammar represents categories of male, female, and gender-neutral, which don't always correspond to the physical qualities of beings. 3) Third, why is it bad or incorrect to think that gender doesn't have to correspond exactly to genitals? Gender as a word is closer to "genre" - both category and gender in French. And since it's "le" genre, can we assume the concept of gender has a penis? In French, at least. (That is the only logical conclusion here.) 260312 what's it to you? who go blather from