[FRIAM] if by 'populism' he meant ...

[Steve Smith]

I held my own idiosyncratic (generally positive) apprehension of
"populism" both for best and worst for the longest time... maybe right
up until it was applied to Trump's appeal.  I now map "mobocracy" much
more strongly onto it.   For me Mobocracy fails worse than the mere
implications of "unwashed masses", but rather the entrainment aspects of
mob-swarms.   An idea doesn't have to be "good" to be "popular".  

On 12/23/20 9:47 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> I recently saw an article that defined populism as something like the
> resentment of poorly paid, poorly benefitted, and for the most-part
> hands-on workers toward those who have reasonably well-paying,
> well-benefitted, and can-work-from-home jobs. 
> _
> _
> __-- Russ Abbott                                      
> Professor, Computer Science
> California State University, Los Angeles
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 8:38 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com
> <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
>
>     To the extent I can be gzipped, am I not also redundant?
>
>     -----Original Message-----
>     From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
>     <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
>     Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2020 6:55 AM
>     To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
>     Subject: [FRIAM] if by 'populism' he meant ...
>
>     Britain’s Last Day in Brussels: A Populist Punch-Up
>     https://bylinetimes.com/2020/12/08/britains-last-day-in-brussels-a-populist-punch-up/
>     <https://bylinetimes.com/2020/12/08/britains-last-day-in-brussels-a-populist-punch-up/>
>
>     I've struggled to understand what populism means. The dictionary
>     definition is no help (appeal to ordinary people) because I don't
>     think such people exist. There is no "average person". We're all
>     "elite" (special) in some way or another. Each thing has its own
>     particularity. (Down to Pauli exclusion.) Binning concrete things
>     into classes requires removing particulars. This kindasorta
>     implies that populism means appealing to the most common feature
>     set. Average every possible feature and choose the top, say, 5-7
>     most common features.
>
>     But that's a problem because we people aren't very objective. So,
>     a data-driven populist would stick pretty close to an algorithm
>     like that. But a "populist" politician probably would not. There's
>     some other criteria at work ... some *conception* of the ordinary
>     person that isn't objective ... a kind of shared subjectivity,
>     "intersubjectivity"
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity>>?
>
>     My *guess* is that the way "populist" is used refers to a shared
>     *delusion* ... like the American Dream, which was always a
>     delusion. It's simply becoming more obvious as our information
>     ecology changes. The intersubjectivity involved seems to be a mass
>     psychogenic illness
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness>> ...
>     kinda like popular music and the same damned person winning the
>     pop contest year upon year.
>
>     I'd be grateful for any criticism of that conclusion.
>
>     I have another idea that was triggered by the Byline article: that
>     populism is a kind of forcing structure [⛧], a reduction from high
>     to low dimension, from high to low diversity. Where "elites" take
>     an appropriate amount of time to, say, explain/understand quantum
>     decoherence, a populist over-simplifies it so that the "ordinary
>     person" can believe they see it everywhere. Or, where "elites"
>     accept the cost of sympathizing with each particular wak they
>     meet, the populist stereotypes those [in|out] of their tribe. This
>     2nd idea could be seen as a derivative of the 1st one, where the
>     shared delusion is the overly simplified model. I'm not as
>     interested in criticism of this 2nd idea. Killing the 1st idea
>     would, I think, kill the 2nd. But if the 1st idea sounds about
>     right, then it might be worth trashing the 2nd.
>
>
>     [⛧] ... whether [endo|exo]genous, which isn't irrelevant, but
>     perhaps tangential.
>
>     --
>     ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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