@lostgen @tagesschau Quite a large part of the sensation seeking mainstream press has been corrupt for longer than today. They care more about making money then about saving the planet or defending democracy. And one day the word corrupt will no longer be enough. Then the word complicit will make more sense. #fascism #populism #climate
From a review in #TheGuardian
What I know from others' summaries makes me think these profs do protest "partisan bias" too much, suggesting that the #pandemic wasn't as bad as the political response, and that #maskMandates and #lockdowns should have been based on public opinion.
After a few decades on the #internet the highlighted text told me everything I needed to know.
![Screenshot from The Atlantic. It has the cover of Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee's book "In Covid's Wake," with a thumbs-down emoji some enterprising and no doubt good-looking person pasted over it.
The text of the article shown is: Policy learning seemed to be short-circuited during the pandemic,” Lee said. “It became so moralized, like: ‘We’re not interested in looking at how other people are [responding to the pandemic], because only bad people would do it a different way from the way we’re doing’.”
She and Macedo spoke to the Guardian by video call. The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. “Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,” he said.
The highlighted text is " The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning"](https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/114/291/127/181/127/304/original/9d3ba78fe7c40bc6.png "Screenshot from The Atlantic. It has the cover of Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee's book \"In Covid's Wake,\" with a thumbs-down emoji some enterprising and no doubt good-looking person pasted over it.
The text of the article shown is: Policy learning seemed to be short-circuited during the pandemic,” Lee said. “It became so moralized, like: ‘We’re not interested in looking at how other people are [responding to the pandemic], because only bad people would do it a different way from the way we’re doing’.”
She and Macedo spoke to the Guardian by video call. The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. “Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,” he said.
The highlighted text is \" The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning\"")
"Similar to plebiscites and referendums, direct economics seeks to do an end run around experts and incumbents and communicate straight to individual citizens and voters. It tries to demystify what have long been naturalised processes captured in stock market indices, interest rates and even fiat currency, to expose these as mere tools of the elites in further oppressing the true people.
We can see direct economics in action in three different ways. First is the centralisation of executive power in US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. The arbitrariness of his tariff announcements is taken as a demerit by many. Yet arguably, from the point of view of direct economics, it is this very arbitrariness that is their strength.
(...)
Direct economics constitutes a powerful attack on existing institutions and people that stand between the citizens and their leaders. Whether its tactics, gimmicks and whims can outlast their tumultuous effects on the conventional markets is something that the next weeks and months will show. So far, the interest rate on US Treasury bills is sliding downwards, and consumer confidence is plummeting too. The gamble of direct economics is that none of this will matter."
https://www.ft.com/content/5d5be168-ada4-4fc2-a213-374334888514
Touching on Trump's "America First" stance, Takaichi said "上等だ。日本もジャパンファーストで、製造業を国内にとどめ置く (Fine. Japan should also go "Japan First" and keep manufacturing industries in Japan)"
Can just see collective face-palming at Keidanren and METI
#populism
Trump goes full gameshow host to push his #tariff plan – and nobody’s a winner
The winner?
#Trump, of course, the maestro of fake #populism, watched by a crowd that included men in hard hats and fluorescent construction worker vests.
The #losers?
Everybody else.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/trump-tariffs-white-house-sketch
For Europe’s populists, Trump is a mixed blessing – POLITICO https://www.byteseu.com/888824/ #DonaldTrump #Europe #EuropeanPolitics #populism #Unpacked
Has populism gone that far to make us forget our will to build, create, tell, move, if it can't be marketed? It also doesn't sit right with me how much it fits the "degenerated art" ambiance that's been slowly getting in the air, alongside of #fascism .
As long as people will be allowed to be brainwashed people & ai bots to influence elections for a facist entity, nothing is to be taken lightly.
It is a tool that produces results and has good/useful uses. It should improve our lives, not make us dumber, lazier and be the sole source of knowledge/"creation"
If the trend we see currently on social media, search engines, writing... Is our future, then it is very bleak.
Are people forgetting the very core of what makes our #humanity ? #humans #facism #ai #aiart #populism #aitools #criticalthinking #creativity #aitools #aieverywhere
The surge of ai and its ignorance of taste, making things better by adding more, and so on, is correlating with the average lack of consideration for #creation, #art and #artists and global #antiintellectualism ; highlighting global reluctance to partake into any activity requiring to think by oneself. #literacy #criticalthinking #CriticalLiteracy #literacyMatters #ai #artificialintelligence #medialiteracy #populism #facism
For my enemies, no law 
“The genius of #populism is to claim victimhood regardless.” #LePen
open.substack.com/pub/benansel...
For my enemies, no law
"The problem, indeed, is a more general one. No populism, right or left, has so far produced a powerful remedy for the ills it denounces. Programmatically, the contemporary opponents of neoliberalism are still for the most part whistling in the dark. How is inequality to be tackled – not just tinkered with – in a serious fashion, without immediately bringing on a capital strike? What measures might be envisaged for meeting the enemy blow for blow on that contested terrain, and emerging victorious? What sort of reconstruction, by now inevitably a radical one, of actually existing liberal democracy would be required to put an end to the oligarchies it has spawned? How is the deep state, organised in every Western country for imperial war – clandestine or overt – to be dismantled? What reconversion of the economy to combat climate change, without impoverishing already poor societies in other continents, is imagined? That so many arrows remain missing in the quiver of serious opposition to the status quo is not, of course, just the fault of today’s populisms. It reflects the intellectual contraction of the left in its long years of retreat since the 1970s, and the sterility in that time of what were once original strands of thought at the edges of the mainstream. Remedial proposals can be cited, varying from country to country: Medicare for all in the US, guaranteed citizen incomes in Italy, public investment banks in Britain, Tobin taxes in France and the like. But so far as any general, interlocking alternative to the status quo is concerned, the cupboard is still bare. (...) Politically speaking, neoliberalism has been in no great danger from either."
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/perry-anderson/regime-change-in-the-west
What happens to ordinary people under #populism: #Orban's rule has been #Hungary the poorest, most corrupt country in #Europe
https://journa.host/@anneapplebaum/114256644338695017
anneapplebaum@journa.host - Hungary shows us the endgame of autocratic populism: poverty and corruption
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/viktor-orban-hungary-maga-corruption/682111/
Evidence shows that populism means criminal, antidemocratic and antisocial beliefs and actions by endlessly corrupt politicians.
"Most people drop the #ideology pretty quickly once they get the #support they need. They belong to these groups because they’re getting something from them. You have to become the surrogate of that support so they don’t need the group any more."
As a hate-filled kid, I turned to #farrightideology. Now I help others avoid that path | Matthew Quinn | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2025/mar/28/far-right-ideology-sydney-suburbs-city
#hatecrime
#farrightgroups
#farrightgrooming
#underlyingcausesofracism
#populism
#supportgroup
#grooming
Gizmodo: A Populist Influencer Is Running for Congress, and She Actually Understands YouTube. “Journalist and influencer Kat Abughazaleh announced she’s running for Congress in a YouTube video. In a video that looked more like a livestream than an announcement of a bid for office, Abughazaleh promised to run a transparent campaign, fight for affordable groceries, and stand up to […]
Nigel Farage could turn the UK into a ‘Trump tribute act’ 
. Is this the future of UK politics? #UKPolitics #Populism
https://champ.ly/SHmdNnzl
I just discovered a rabbit hole website for people who search knowledge and background about modern #populism and threats to democracies: The European Center For Populism Studies (working about the whole world) https://www.populismstudies.org/ Perhaps interesting for others, too.
The work of management thinker Stafford Beer on cybernetics and requisite variety might seem obscure, but it holds one of the keys to understanding the world around us. Please check out the free weekly essay on my personal blog for more! https://sharpenyouraxe.substack.com/p/what-went-wrong #populism
Cutting the size has increased the cost in most cases in the past decades. It has also decreased the quality of the outcome in most occasions. The only goal this neoliberal populism has achieved is to destabilize and weaken labor and its organized resistance, which is the true face of neoliberalism.
#Neoliberalism =anti-#Syndicalism = #Fascism = #anti-communsim
It is capital's reaction to labor organization for 1.5 centuries, dressed with pseudo-ideology and tons of #populism
"So far, the net effect of #MAGA foreign policy has been to get exactly zero concessions from Moscow, while simultaneously reviving the fortunes of #Canada’s #LiberalParty and helping the mainstream center-right win in #Greenland."
The Global #PopulistRight Has a MAGA Problem - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/trump-populism-britain/682055/
