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

Wed Dec 23 13:22:00 EST 2020

See:
Masters, Lackeys and Serfs: Why Authoritarianism Persists in the 21st
Century and How to Oppose It

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FPZMBVN/ref=cm_sw_r_em_apa_bS44Fb1ZV2YVK

Tom

On Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:19 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I first heard the word extensively as a description of the appeal of Huey
> Long.  He was a Louisiana farm boy who didn't like city people.  As
> governor he ordered the National Guard to occupy New Orleans' City Hall.
> They set up machine guns in the hallways.
>
> See
>
>
> https://www.amazon.com/dp/1565543033/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fabc_MT34Fb7PP3SNJ
>
> He was famous for the campaign slogan, "A chicken in every pot."
>
> Frank
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:07 AM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>> 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>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> To the extent I can be gzipped, am I not also redundant?
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
>>> Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2020 6:55 AM
>>> To: FriAM <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/
>>>
>>> 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>?
>>>
>>> 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> ... 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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>>
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