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

[Frank Wimberly]

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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