The rise of nationalist populism, although something I still disagree quite contentiously with, really begins making more sense when opinions like this start leaking out.
And populism can be defined as “support for the concerns of ordinary people”. [2] Is this a bad thing? Would we prefer our politics be for the rich or for the companies? Populism too has an association with reactionary movements, but what is the alternative? A platonic corporate king to rule us all? Democracy is inherently populist. It is ugly. But it is better than all other forms of governance. It feels in general that we “ordinary people” are being divided by those who favor companies over countries and in reality favor their own power and wealth over sharing power with others. Nationalist populism seems a better alternative than corporate oligarchy.
[1] https://eppc.org/publications/i-and-my-brother-against-my-co...
Nicely put.
Around the Iraq War, I remember some clever cynic pointing out that while we might 'export democracy', it's still democratic for 51% of the people to vote to murder the other 49%. Or perhaps more commonly, to vote for a permanent dictator from the 51%. The fundamental advance of a healthy government isn't (just) democracy, it's a bedrock of inalienable or hard-to-alienate rights.
The recent talk about the 'paradox of liberalism' has been interesting, but it's all felt a bit misguided to me. There's a real question, sure, but the entire fight between "let intolerance go unchecked" and "be intolerant of intolerance" was a false dichotomy. The missing alternative is liberalism within boundaries - setting some threshold of behavior which isn't permitted, and can't be permitted by any minor political swing.
(Arguably what we were having was a debate about where to set those boundaries, but if so I wish we could actually say that.)
One example is that “Populism” means quite different things in US vs Latin America vs EU. In US it’s always had this agrarian, rights of the farmers, Jeffersonian element to it that distrusts big business. In Latin America, it’s about taking on the permanent plutocracy of the landed rich, and in the EU...it’s often just a euphemism for neo-Fascism-lite.
This sort of attitude might seem like "nationalist populism" now, but it wasn't that long ago that "the left" was on the same page. I still am personally, but there seems to be a disturbing trend where anti-Trump sentiment is being leveraged to promote a corporate agenda.
Particularly the idea that "diversity is the root of our problems" and "immigration is inherently bad". These ideas seem central to most of the nationalist movements in western society recently.
It's one of those issues where it appears that party lines have been drawn around it and both sides seem to be drifting more and more extreme.
I don't think that the average person is that polarized on some of these issues, but instead I think party members are afraid of being shunned for not fervently agreeing.
If national sovereignty overrides everything, one country mandates X, and another mandates not-X - then that's not compatible with a globally connected internet; since each of them will require the "other" thing to be removed from "their" internet, and that leads to segmentation, blocking and separation.
What do you do when country A requires all maps to show that some territory belongs to them, and country B requires the same?
What do you do when country A requires particular data to be stored so that they have access to it, and country B requires that the same data is stored so that country A does not have access to it?
What if country A wants people to be say X without restrictions, and country B wants everyone to be prohibited from saying X?
If you separate everything cleanly into "areas of sovereignty" then you can't really have a single, globally connected, integrated internet, as services/content can't satisfy all conflicting requirements and thus be available everywhere the same; if you do not, then the sovereignty of at least some countries will be limited. For me, the best solution would be if we could come to some agreement about some global, universal rules/principles for the internet, but that inevitably requires countries to hand over some of their sovereignty and abstain from any making requirements contrary to these rules.
The bureaucracy of centralized governments was practical, but it didn't kept up with the diversification of society. The self driving car stuff could effect housing too, think about self driving mobile homes, that cluster and arrange based on your preferences, basically going back to a nomadic way of living, but in a techy way.
This could be a solution to many problems of the static nature of cities, and problems that start perpetuating upwards from there.
Meaningful human connection requires some amount of basic honesty.
> I agree with my colleague Masha Gessen that the whole issue has been blown out of proportion. ... if I could do it all over again, I would have highlighted just how inept and haphazard those attempts were. That the Agency is now widely seen as a savvy, efficient manipulator of American public opinion is, in no small part, the fault of experts. They may derive their authority from perceived neutrality, but in reality they—we—have interests, just like everyone else. And, when it comes to the Trump-Russia story, those interests are often best served by fuelling the fear of Kremlin meddling.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-so-called-experts-...
By coincidence I am a Texan and I've had some really interesting conversations on the internet and have been exposed to a wide variety of viewpoints and information sources that vastly outweigh that of Putin's little troll farms.
That line seems to be incredibly arbitrary.