One thing that's interesting about all this is the media's coverage. The U.S. media has virtually exclusively covered the protests in Hong Kong, and barely mentions any of the other (often larger and more violent) protests.
> The U.S. media has virtually exclusively covered the protests in Hong Kong, and barely mentions any of the other (often larger and more violent) protests.
That's clearly not true and very easy to disprove.
Iraq, Iran, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia have all gotten continued coverage in US media. I can provide, say, 100 links to stories spanning all the major US news sources for those protests if you require it, dating back to the beginnings of the protests in Chile and going forward.
NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, NY Post, NPR, TIME, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Hill, Bloomberg, Voice of America, Reuters US, CNBC and so on have in total covered all of the protests persistently.
A quick drop into Google news with "Iraq protests" or "Iran protests" or "Bolivia protests" or "Chile protests" pulls up a lot of US news articles spanning the totality of the protests in question. Chile got enormous coverage in particular.
Try France general strike protests to see a relative pacuity of coverage in the US media - one round at the start, and 6-7 days later, another round as the government moves a bit. Maybe a smattering a couple days ago.
I think the assertion is not there is no coverage, just little coverage - and that's difficult to prove with data as it's a judgement call as to how much is too much or too little. It ends up a matter of opinion for the most part.
that is because Hong Kong is very close to china, geographically and economically, so the stakes are higher. China under Trump has become more relevant than ever, compared to the rest of the world which has been pushed to the periphery
Yes, this time we actually have a chance of fixing the mess we've gotten into with China. They tried to lord rare earths over the rest of the world, and it backfired massively, that's a great sign.
The media coverage is likely affect by the increasingly elite backgrounds of people working in it, and the large corporations buying outlets/pushing more pro status quo views (for the latter, see Sinclair and their buyouts of local TV stations).
Have any of the protests been anywhere near the scale of Hong Kong? The Hong Kong protests regularly drew as many as 2 million people. That's more than 25% of the entire country. For comparison sake, that'd be like a single US protest drawing 82 million people.
Even comparing to the Chile protests, those were just 1 million people in a country with 18 million. Proportionally that makes them only one fifth the size of Hong Kong. Plus the Chilean protests only lasted for a few weeks before quickly falling to under 10,000 people. In comparison the HK protests have been ongoing for nearly a year.
I'm not sure why the Netherlands is even included in the list. There have been some protests against specific government policies, but not an attempt to overthrow the government as such (as far as I noticed).
Edit: Currently certain suburbs of The Hague are in revolt because the New Years bonfire was cancelled. It seems pretty childish, and I think most of the rioters are in fact children, but they have heavy weapons in the form of fireworks taped together.
I'm a little late, but maybe Iraq is? I can't find anywhere online that mentions the protest's size, but security forces and militia have killed over 400 protesters so far. In some ways that seems to make it more newsworthy then Hong Kong.
Agreed. I think the beauty of the phrase "shit is fucked up and stuff", is that the problems we face are so overwhelmingly obvious that we don't actually have to articulate them. And since the usual way calls for change are defused is by arguing about definitions, terms, assumptions, etc, in many ways articulating what shit is fucked up is counterproductive to change.
I think you will find that when you do articulate, absolutely everybody has a different interpretation of exactly which parts are fucked, and how to unfuck it, and who exactly should foot the bill. Perhaps some of them think you should, or people of your income bracket, or people who share your other demographic traits. Presumably you have a different opinion. And, of course, differences in opinion is anathema to a good protest march.
The true beauty of the message is that it's vague enough to get both you and the guy next to you (and the guy you would both intensely dislike if you knew the full extent of their opinions) to all come out and smash shit up at the same time in a coordinated manner.
> The true beauty of the message is that it's vague enough to get both you and the guy next to you to all come out and smash shit up at the same time in a coordinated manner...
... but the hidden ugly side is that you and the guy next to you will not agree on how to rebuild things once you're both done smashing stuff.
What really scares me is not only how fragile things are, but how expensive it's going to be to get back to the level of wealth we enjoy today, assuming it's even likely we are able to (which I'm not so sure about).
It is easier to be against something than it is to be for something else. A lot of revolts break down after they remove the power they are opposed to because the participants are not united by a common constructive vision for an alternative.
But some of those protests are in prosperous places. The economy has been getting better for a long time in Chile. Hong Kong isn't hurting, either - or at least wasn't until the start of the protests.
You're right, these events are often triggered by a combination of factors, and repression of freedoms is often a factor. But I don't see any repression of freedoms either.
But also consider that it is not necessary for things to be _uniformly_ bad to trigger a large protest. E.g. France is "prosperous" on paper, yet a substantial segment of its population is really hurting, and they blame the "progressive" policies of Macron et al for that.
I read some opinions about HK protests, and they were saying, basically, that HK youth has no chance to buy an apartment and live a good middle class life, hence the revolt.
This is something that is not captured in GDP growth metric. To me it makes perfect sense.
What is the point of, say, 5% GDP growth if you pay 1/2 of your salary as rent and will never accumulate enough dough for downpayment?
Hmm. By that standard, chunks of the US are also tinder waiting for a match - the coastal cities because costs (housing in particular) are too high, and the heartland because incomes are too low.
“Authoritarian populism” and “progressive populism” are
widely-used names of particular political ideologies. While their etymology of course relates to the more general sense of, respectively, “authoritarian” and “progressive” in denoting political ideologies, in both cases the definition is not a simple combination of the general sense of one of those terms with the general sense of “populism”, but much narrower. Authoritarian populism is a particular subset of right-of-center populism and progressive populism is a particular subset of left-of-center populism, and they are, in fact, non-overlapping even if, arguably, “progressive” and “authoritarian” are not. (Similarly, “authoritarian populism” arguably is not even a subset of “authoritarianism”, though it at least overlaps with it.)
> See, for example, Venezuela.
“Progressive” and “socialist” aren't mutually exclusive, but neither does the latter imply the former; “progressive” and “authoritarian” might overlap, but Venezuela's government isn't an example as it isn't progressive.
I don't recall that I've heard "authoritarian populism" as a term before, so I don't think that it's massively widely spread. (I'm not in political circles, but I do pay some attention.)
My main problem is with the connotations. Progress = good, authoritarianism = bad, so "progressive populism" sounds good, and "authoritarian populism" sounds bad. The wording is probably deliberately designed to paint one side as better than the other. In fact, though, "progressive populism" can wind up being every bit as authoritarian and ugly and brutal as "authoritarian populism" can.
I’ve also heard that this is a deliberate propaganda message being spread by the CCP though — claiming that the protests are really about economics rather than democracy.
Historically, political protests (and revolutions) almost always have strong economic components, political change is rarely an abstract goal but a solution sought for concrete, mostly economic, problems. Abstract political protests that have no economic component rarely become significant, because few people are willing to take substantial risks for them.
The idea that the protests are principally economic doesn't contradict that they have a political dimension, indeed, it makes the likelihood that the protestors would seek and sacrifice for political change greater.
To some degree, the Trump and Bernie campaigns set back that sort of reaction. By offering alternatives that involved voting for a new type of candidate rather than marching in the street.
If nothing much changes in terms of the status quo because of those politicians or their campaigns however, that's when you'll probably see the marches in the streets, protests, etc.
I don't think it happens until the next major recession. Even if you aren't personally benefiting from the equity bull market there's too much easy credit and rates are too low. As soon as that goes and the people at the bottom are really screwed then we see something akin to Occupy Wall Street at 100x the scale.
In general I do think easy access to consumer credit is the difference between the US and everywhere else. It numbs over systemic issues and provides the illusion that things are better than they really are. AFAIK credit is much harder to come by in other countries, which is why seemingly small things like an increase in gas prices, transit fares, or a small tax blow up in other countries when it wouldn't have the same effect here.
My bet was on the next recession being a trigger of significant societal change (or vice versa like a big political upset ) ... but I don't know anymore.
I look around and sure, a few people are talking about recession concerns but most people don't seem to care.
Credit is cheap of course you'll finance that house at 3.5% or buy the new 40k car at 2%. Spend spend spend is how we keep things afloat in hopes that when the music stops, _we_ aren't the ones left holding the bag.
I agree that easy credit has this awesome ability to mask over deep societal problems. We spend enough to not worry that we've built a lot of things on sand that may not hold up in a bad storm and it's so strange sometimes to watch.
I'm hoping we can avoid another 2008 or something worse but the current system seems unsustainable longterm. Something has to give for as long as we expect more money in the future
Interesting thing is, this message is universal. You can drop it in at any time, any place in history, and it will make sense and be supported by a significant demographic, quite possibly everybody.
So if you have the tools to amplify this message until it's all that anyone sees, and everybody knows that it's all that everybody else sees, you can cause revolts at your convenience.
You don't even need to dirty your hands with direct message shaping - which comes with consequences such as getting your head chopped off - just moderate all the competing messages a tiny little bit harder, and bob's your uncle.
As a direct example, notice how the author judges the size and effectiveness of revolts based on how prominent they are on youtube. Which is just an algorithm tweak away for the right people.
Perhaps. Protests aren't exactly revolts, and revolts aren't exactly revolutions. Until people start banding together in distinct geographical locations and drawing up alternative systems of government (or skipping straight to direct, but loosely organized, physical opposition to the existing government) it seems likely it can be contained and ideally, addressed.
That said, the current connected world has probably reduced the available reaction time between each stage of escalation, so getting complacent wouldn't be advisable.
Maybe the masses are saying "More stuff for <people like me> and <people I like> and less stuff for <people I don't like> and <people with stuff I want>".
A fairly silly article with a fairly silly thesis. There’s always protest movements going on somewhere; it would take a lot of statistics to convince me that 2019 is any kind of outlier.
And there’s nothing global about the current grab-bag of movements, they’re very much local issues.
exactly. many of these counties are always protesting about something. America's constitutional republic , compared to direct democracy, somewhat helps buffer against such unrest.
>So what are we to make of this mess? Why the frenzy of protests – and why now?
Except that many of these countries are always protesting about something. In any year one can find at least a dozen countries that have had protests of some sort. Hong Kong had protests in 2014 too. And Brazil had protests in 2016 over bus fares, and in 2015, 2013, etc.. Brazil has protests every year over bus fares, it seems. The remarkably geopolitical stability of the US and its strong economy , compared to the unrest everywhere else (such as Hong Kong, Lebanon, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Chile, etc.), yet again torpedoes the media narrative in 2016-2017 that Trump would user in an era social unrest and economic instability in the US...the opposite has happened, with America being even more stable and economically successful relative to much of the rest of the world. The media got it all wrong, predicting collapse and instability in the US, when the instability and high inflation occurred elsewhere instead.
Given the post-modern reality we occupy, where people can basically pick and choose their reality (read: echo chambers) and not only pick them, but entrench themselves due to the cognitive dissonance felt if you try to exit them, I suspect you're partially correct.
Never before in history have journalists had the analytics tools to carefully guide stories to virality. If it bleeds, it leads has always been true, but now journalists have the ability to not just find stories where it bleeds, but they have the analytics and the tools to massage the story such that a papercut is perceived by the reader as a mortal flesh wound. Everything is exaggerated in the pursuit of eyeballs and ad impressions.
Furthermore, you can get "stuck" in a story by following hyperlinks of tangential information, and assign greater importance than you would in the past when newspapers were read top to bottom, front to back, changing subjects with each article.
This is a symptom of economic problems. Look up what hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio has to say about the global debt crisis. https://youtu.be/5C43i3yclec
Basically we are entering a global depression due to untenable debt levels. WWIII is a distinct possibility.
The current power structures are responsible for climate destruction that means many of our children will be forced to spend their lives in an Earth worse than what their parents experienced. Meanwhile, the leaders of those power structures have taken no responsibility, no change of course, and instead have enriched themselves more and more.
The fundamental premise of society is that power comes with responsibility. Today we see billionaires, world leaders, and autocrats amassing ever more power while demonstrating no responsibility.
Is it any surprise people want to tear it all down even if they don't know what they want instead?
> The fundamental premise of society is that power comes with responsibility.
Is that typically true? It seems the pattern is often:
person/group amass power -> things are okay for a while -> power corrupts and there's longrunning abuse of power -> [time] -> society eventually makes noise and/group gets destabilized/dies -> repeat
Sure. In fact, take any category of power relations; these are categories of people, related by power over one another. Then, the dual category is one of responsibility relations.
To say that Prima has power over Secunda is to say that Prima can alter Secunda's environment arbitrarily. However, this is equivalent to Secunda requiring certain open-ended alterations to their environment, and being unable to establish those alterations without Prima.
No matter how many times one goes around the concept, one cannot be responsible without having the power to enact the responsibility, and one cannot be empowered without having expectations on the use of that power.
group amasses power under leadership signifucantly more competent than competitors in a war -> things are ok for a while because group's opponents are spent in blood and treasure, and also because of competent leadership -> [time] -> new interest groups form, old opponents recover strength, leadership declines due to reversion to the mean and complacency -> war breaks out when the government is sufficiently weakened -> repeat
By "fundamental premise" I meant something along the lines of "the reason any human is ever OK with another human having power". If we didn't assume some correlation between power and responsible use thereof, we would all either be hermits, or tearing each other to pieces.
I think you're projecting. I don't think that a single one of these protest movements has to do with global warming.
I don't think they're linked at all. People saying they're linked reminds me of people who argued for some connection between the Viet Cong and the '68 Paris riots. Uh huh.
Some of them are even protests against measures that may improve the environment, such as raising fossil fuel prices, or the farmers' protests against measures to reduce nitrogen run-offs in the Netherlands.
For anyone unfamiliar, this is Martin Gurri's blog. He's the author of The Revolt of the Public (Stripe press), a book that's making the rounds in the tech industry. I'm part way through with it, but it's main thesis is the rise of the internet and social media has increased and decentralized the public's access to information and this has led to a break down in the legitimacy of traditional authorities (governments, media, academia, elites).
I don't think anyone can doubt that narrative-breaking information is now more readily available and that authorities are more under the microscope than ever. This must have some political/societal ramifications.
The result of all this information is as much a more informed voter population as it is creating a huge swath of just angry people. Whether this burst of protests in 2019 fits this narrative is open to debate and probably unprovable, but to his point calling it all random ends the chance of considering what the effects are of the continuing and accelerating flood of information available to people and the lowered efforts needed to create mass protests.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadThat's clearly not true and very easy to disprove.
Iraq, Iran, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia have all gotten continued coverage in US media. I can provide, say, 100 links to stories spanning all the major US news sources for those protests if you require it, dating back to the beginnings of the protests in Chile and going forward.
NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, NY Post, NPR, TIME, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Hill, Bloomberg, Voice of America, Reuters US, CNBC and so on have in total covered all of the protests persistently.
A quick drop into Google news with "Iraq protests" or "Iran protests" or "Bolivia protests" or "Chile protests" pulls up a lot of US news articles spanning the totality of the protests in question. Chile got enormous coverage in particular.
I think the assertion is not there is no coverage, just little coverage - and that's difficult to prove with data as it's a judgement call as to how much is too much or too little. It ends up a matter of opinion for the most part.
There were a bunch of protests about mostly random things, but none were really large by German standards.
Well maybe the farmers protesting (imteresting because somewhat unexpected), but that seems too boring from an international perspective.
Even comparing to the Chile protests, those were just 1 million people in a country with 18 million. Proportionally that makes them only one fifth the size of Hong Kong. Plus the Chilean protests only lasted for a few weeks before quickly falling to under 10,000 people. In comparison the HK protests have been ongoing for nearly a year.
Edit: Currently certain suburbs of The Hague are in revolt because the New Years bonfire was cancelled. It seems pretty childish, and I think most of the rioters are in fact children, but they have heavy weapons in the form of fireworks taped together.
Here's an article criticizing the media for not covering it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/13/hundreds-...
And I wonder how long until this comes to the USA...
The true beauty of the message is that it's vague enough to get both you and the guy next to you (and the guy you would both intensely dislike if you knew the full extent of their opinions) to all come out and smash shit up at the same time in a coordinated manner.
... but the hidden ugly side is that you and the guy next to you will not agree on how to rebuild things once you're both done smashing stuff.
What really scares me is not only how fragile things are, but how expensive it's going to be to get back to the level of wealth we enjoy today, assuming it's even likely we are able to (which I'm not so sure about).
The problem is if you run around and protest without any real goal, you end up with a big nothing burger 7+ years later.
But I was thinking about several percent of the country marching in the streets. That's not something we've seen yet.
Unlikely to happen here seeing that unemployment is at a 50 year low and wages are rising.
But also consider that it is not necessary for things to be _uniformly_ bad to trigger a large protest. E.g. France is "prosperous" on paper, yet a substantial segment of its population is really hurting, and they blame the "progressive" policies of Macron et al for that.
I read some opinions about HK protests, and they were saying, basically, that HK youth has no chance to buy an apartment and live a good middle class life, hence the revolt.
This is something that is not captured in GDP growth metric. To me it makes perfect sense. What is the point of, say, 5% GDP growth if you pay 1/2 of your salary as rent and will never accumulate enough dough for downpayment?
> See, for example, Venezuela.
“Progressive” and “socialist” aren't mutually exclusive, but neither does the latter imply the former; “progressive” and “authoritarian” might overlap, but Venezuela's government isn't an example as it isn't progressive.
My main problem is with the connotations. Progress = good, authoritarianism = bad, so "progressive populism" sounds good, and "authoritarian populism" sounds bad. The wording is probably deliberately designed to paint one side as better than the other. In fact, though, "progressive populism" can wind up being every bit as authoritarian and ugly and brutal as "authoritarian populism" can.
The idea that the protests are principally economic doesn't contradict that they have a political dimension, indeed, it makes the likelihood that the protestors would seek and sacrifice for political change greater.
If nothing much changes in terms of the status quo because of those politicians or their campaigns however, that's when you'll probably see the marches in the streets, protests, etc.
In general I do think easy access to consumer credit is the difference between the US and everywhere else. It numbs over systemic issues and provides the illusion that things are better than they really are. AFAIK credit is much harder to come by in other countries, which is why seemingly small things like an increase in gas prices, transit fares, or a small tax blow up in other countries when it wouldn't have the same effect here.
I look around and sure, a few people are talking about recession concerns but most people don't seem to care.
Credit is cheap of course you'll finance that house at 3.5% or buy the new 40k car at 2%. Spend spend spend is how we keep things afloat in hopes that when the music stops, _we_ aren't the ones left holding the bag.
I agree that easy credit has this awesome ability to mask over deep societal problems. We spend enough to not worry that we've built a lot of things on sand that may not hold up in a bad storm and it's so strange sometimes to watch.
I'm hoping we can avoid another 2008 or something worse but the current system seems unsustainable longterm. Something has to give for as long as we expect more money in the future
So if you have the tools to amplify this message until it's all that anyone sees, and everybody knows that it's all that everybody else sees, you can cause revolts at your convenience.
You don't even need to dirty your hands with direct message shaping - which comes with consequences such as getting your head chopped off - just moderate all the competing messages a tiny little bit harder, and bob's your uncle.
As a direct example, notice how the author judges the size and effectiveness of revolts based on how prominent they are on youtube. Which is just an algorithm tweak away for the right people.
Why would someone downvote this? It's a statement of fact.
(For the record, I didn't downvote you. I can't - you replied to me. I probably wouldn't anyway.)
That said, the current connected world has probably reduced the available reaction time between each stage of escalation, so getting complacent wouldn't be advisable.
And there’s nothing global about the current grab-bag of movements, they’re very much local issues.
Except that many of these countries are always protesting about something. In any year one can find at least a dozen countries that have had protests of some sort. Hong Kong had protests in 2014 too. And Brazil had protests in 2016 over bus fares, and in 2015, 2013, etc.. Brazil has protests every year over bus fares, it seems. The remarkably geopolitical stability of the US and its strong economy , compared to the unrest everywhere else (such as Hong Kong, Lebanon, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Chile, etc.), yet again torpedoes the media narrative in 2016-2017 that Trump would user in an era social unrest and economic instability in the US...the opposite has happened, with America being even more stable and economically successful relative to much of the rest of the world. The media got it all wrong, predicting collapse and instability in the US, when the instability and high inflation occurred elsewhere instead.
Never before in history have journalists had the analytics tools to carefully guide stories to virality. If it bleeds, it leads has always been true, but now journalists have the ability to not just find stories where it bleeds, but they have the analytics and the tools to massage the story such that a papercut is perceived by the reader as a mortal flesh wound. Everything is exaggerated in the pursuit of eyeballs and ad impressions.
Furthermore, you can get "stuck" in a story by following hyperlinks of tangential information, and assign greater importance than you would in the past when newspapers were read top to bottom, front to back, changing subjects with each article.
Basically we are entering a global depression due to untenable debt levels. WWIII is a distinct possibility.
The fundamental premise of society is that power comes with responsibility. Today we see billionaires, world leaders, and autocrats amassing ever more power while demonstrating no responsibility.
Is it any surprise people want to tear it all down even if they don't know what they want instead?
Is that typically true? It seems the pattern is often:
person/group amass power -> things are okay for a while -> power corrupts and there's longrunning abuse of power -> [time] -> society eventually makes noise and/group gets destabilized/dies -> repeat
To say that Prima has power over Secunda is to say that Prima can alter Secunda's environment arbitrarily. However, this is equivalent to Secunda requiring certain open-ended alterations to their environment, and being unable to establish those alterations without Prima.
No matter how many times one goes around the concept, one cannot be responsible without having the power to enact the responsibility, and one cannot be empowered without having expectations on the use of that power.
I don't think they're linked at all. People saying they're linked reminds me of people who argued for some connection between the Viet Cong and the '68 Paris riots. Uh huh.
I don't think anyone can doubt that narrative-breaking information is now more readily available and that authorities are more under the microscope than ever. This must have some political/societal ramifications.
The result of all this information is as much a more informed voter population as it is creating a huge swath of just angry people. Whether this burst of protests in 2019 fits this narrative is open to debate and probably unprovable, but to his point calling it all random ends the chance of considering what the effects are of the continuing and accelerating flood of information available to people and the lowered efforts needed to create mass protests.