No, no it is not. It's sad to see that populists won again in our country. I just hope that most of his campagin promises were just over exaggerated to get votes. But we'll just have to wait and see.

Everybody knows that the only way to get rich is to be highly intelligent and competent, and surely whatever gets a single person obscenely rich is also perfectly transferable to improving an entire country.

/s, in case me throwing up in my mouth while typing this didn’t come through over text

Lot of stupid people.

These are Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity:

1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Because they control the narrative by controlling the media and make it seem like their goals align with the stories/expectations in people's heads.

I'd suggest not to take your news from Lemmy which unfortunately is bombarded with doom.

https://www.theknowmedia.co/

By using the internet the way they do. Fascists love new, unregulated media where they can exploit media illiterates. In the meanwhile the only effective things we can do is holding against their rhetoric and spam the mainstream media with leftwing populism that‘s just as brainless.

Bullshit and half truths are 10 times faster to produce than well researched arguments. You can’t win a war if your enemy moves 10 times faster than you so you have to use their ways to beat them or you will die in agony.

Up until recently I hesitated to use populism because it goes against everything I believe in but we will lose this war if we‘re too afraid to get our fingertips a little dirty by playing dirty.

Speaking of using your enemy‘s ways to beat them: The governor of California is a Democrat who practices gerrymandering in the open and gets applauded for it. All Democrats should do it. Not that the Democrats are actually left or anything but the point is it‘s better to win dirty than losing against cheaters. And only if it becomes a problem for both parties will Republicans be willing to join the negotiating table and regulate it together eventually.

The same goes for social media. Only when it becomes a problem for both sides will governments figure something out. After WW2 most of Europe implemented very good regulations for a healthy media landscape but they never applied it to the internet. I think that‘s how we got here for the most part.

Now we are damned to use populist’s weapons to beat them. And I‘m not saying „Go out there, spread lies.“ But exaggerate, meme them, give them names and labels. Walking the streets isn‘t how right wing extremism rose so forget about that. This war is digital for the most part so film them when they do evil in the open and post it. We have to make ourselves visible if we want to be taken seriously. The masses want to see a show so give them one.

The right wins because it can offer real and actionable alternatives to the status quo. Those alternatives are even worse than what they're trying to replace, but it's still possible to get people to believe in them. Meanwhile almost nobody who doesn't directly profit from the working class's suffering believes in the status quo, and for good reason. So how do we stop it? Provide alternatives to the status quo from the left, and be willing to fight for them. The workers only get what they want when they're willing to shut the country down to get it, but modern leftwing politicians don't really have it in them, so people flock to the right instead.

It's the thinking part that's left out.

People are easily swayed by implanting feelings in them over media that are buyable.

My favorite quote is "What can you do with seven billion that you can't do with four?" from the Entrapment (1999).

There isn't a single, hard definition of populism. At first it was the people against aristocracy and even the bourgeoisie joined in the pandering to the people.

It's surprisingly hard to find a true populist as most politicians marked thusly are from the bourgeois class, often independently wealthy.

I'd argue that a hard definition of populism would almost empty out the category.

To brand everyone who misunderstands the term as 'pandering to the people' is a bit harsh. To misunderstand the term doesn't mean an intent to 'poison you're (sic) mind against the very word'.

I agree, but I think populist has been thoroughly poisoned already