12-06-2020, 11:55 AM
(12-05-2020, 09:23 PM)tomh009 Wrote:(12-04-2020, 07:53 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: Trump is not an outlier, you have a strong trend, Johnson, Bolsinaro, there are other examples.
These latest right wing extremists governments have nothing to do with historic progressive conservative values. And it has little to do with the excessively simplified "left/right, liberal/conservative" dichotimy.
I think a better label here is "populist" (or maybe "authoritarian") as you will get many different types that have heavily botched up their countries' COVID responses.
Adding to your list above: AMLO (Mexico). Morawiecki (Poland). Lukashenko (Belarus). Magufuli (Tanzania). Orban (Hungary). And, yes, there are more.
Trump is a fake populist though...
In 2016 he ran a populist campaign, promising to end the wars in the middle east, promising to get universal healthcare to all people etc. etc. But as we found out through his presidency, this was all a lie.
The same thing was done in 2008 with Obama, he ran a populist campaign in 2008, again, promising to end the wars, promising universal healthcare for americans, promising to raise minimum wage, etc. etc...
But as we found out, that didn't happen...
So long as money in politics is a thing in American politics, people like Bernie Sanders - real populists - will be shut out.
As long as billionaires, multi-national corporations, etc., can donate unlimited amounts of money to a campaign, this stuff will continue to happen.
We are seeing fake populists - that are extremely right wing - around the world being elected, in large part to the world social media has created. Social media has created significant divisiveness around the world because all the big social media companies, with regards to their algorithm, promotes things that creates the most engagement. Things that create the most engagement are negative in nature.
There is so much divisiveness because social media - based on the data it collects from you - caters exactly to what it thinks will capture your attention. If you and I had the exact same followers, our home feed would be completely different because the algorithm shows us things that it knows will capture our attention.
sorry for the slightly long post, but things will not change unless these big tech companies are broken up, and regulated.
We are 10 years into this large social experiment of behaviour modification tools called Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, or TikTok. And just in these 10 years, the world has significantly changed, and not for the better...