Interestingly, those push this sentiment the strongest, are also often those who deny others of having any sort of legitimate perspective, using methods that boil down to character assasination rather than argumentative refutation. It seems that such people want to monopolize on what constitutes the truth. That seems a bit... authoritarian to me?

I'm not calling to put him in the reeducation camp or a prison. Reputation is a mechanism of self-regulation in free societies, so it's the opposite of authoritarian.

There is nothing to refute, he's just being manipulative. Politics is "culture" + all "culture" is good and should be accepted without questioning => authoritarian governments are just as good as democratic ones and should not be judged. That's plain nonsense.

> Reputation is a mechanism of self-regulation in free societies, so it's the opposite of authoritarian.

This "reputation" you referred to is nothing more than showing that there are people who have yelled "look, he sides with the enemy!" Nothing in that article you linked is a substantial refutation of his points. Everything is based on attacking his character merely for associating with countries that certain people don't like.

You may recall that "guilt by association" is certainly not a feature that free societies ought to have.

> Politics is "culture" + all "culture" is good and should be accepted without questioning

That is not the point at all. The point is that political systems cannot be easily changed because culture is enduring, meaning we shouldn't be lured by the fantasy that we can overthrow some dictators and voila we have democracy and everyone lives happily ever after. This should be super-obvious if you look at attempts to drop western-style democracy in the middle east: places are now worse off than before.

Another point is that political systems are complex, partly due to tradition and culture, and they cannot be force-fitted to be ranked on an easy, feel-good "authoritarian vs democracy" scale. This means it's a better idea to deal with those systems by talking and engaging with them, and understanding their nuances and merits, rather than taking a forceful "only my perspective is right and everyone else is wrong" approach.

This message is far more nuanced and constructive than you give him credit for. Your approach, "destroy all whom we deem authoritarian; don't listen to them in any way", has empirically resulted in countless amount of suffering in the past few decades, and has created a large amount of resentment in the global south.

It also doesn't help that many who insist on the "authoritarian vs democracy" frame are also those who align with, or at least fail to distance from, US regime change foreign policy, which is known to overthrow democracies and install dictators as long as those dictators favor US interests, while at the same time spinning such efforts as "spreading democracy and fighting for freedom". At their best, such figures often hyper-focus on "democracy", but turn a blind eye towards countries' inability to develop and inability to solve poverty due to how weak they've become after democracy was installed. All this too has generated a large amount of resentment in the global south.