Russia Russia Russia

Thank god for grand unified theories. Without them, the left would have nothing

Japan has been like this for a long time. their refusal to allow more immigration has been a drag on their economy for many years.

Because it works?

😢

Always follow the money!

The Internet was a mistake

The literal hours everyone is spending watching content online (youtube) and social media. Information is a flat circle where anyone can experience any ideology and the algorithm pushes the attention where it wants.

We, all of us, are boiled frogs in this information stewpot.

Social media

trust in elite institutions worldwide took a bunch of blows in the 1990s-2000s and then imploded in 2008, and elites worldwide, facing a crisis of hegemony, decided to scapegoat the Other (as is traditional). because war against a peer state is much costlier now, they aimed at immigrants instead.

Immigrants have always been an easy scapegoat because they rarely have the means to fight back. So the question could be broken down into 1. Why are so many people looking for someone to blame and 2. Why are they all picking the same one?

1. My theory:there was a century-plus of rapid change spurred by industrialization and computerization which at least gave the perception of rising-tides growth, and that period ended about 20 years ago. So now many people are perceiving stagnation as decline.

There are many other people facing actual decline who are rightly identifying the cause, but for people who are just rueing lack of growth, you get the Fukuyama's Last Man scenario you quoted.

2. I think the lockstep anti immigrant stance is probably a result of unprecedented centralized control of communication by exactly the people who are most invested in presenting a viable scapegoat.

Not enough helium in the atmosphere.

Social media, the really interesting part though is by rights it should have started happening in Japan earlier, I guess we can chalk that up to all their, small c, conservative institutions holding back the waters.

The rich; they need eating.

The overwhelming majority of people globally don't understand how the Internet works, how expertise actually works, or how their own reasoning works. Bad actors exploit all three by mimicking expertise and disseminating ideas at high volume and low cost.

All I can tell you is back in early 2000s these people were called “the 27%” and now they are pushing 40% 😬

Anti-‘communism’

People find it easier to notice the obvious lies in countries other than their own, even when they're exactly the same. Plus, life is getting worse and they don't have much to be economically conservative about so they're conserving 'their' homeland.

Fascists literally have international conferences to swap strategies. Orban spoke at CPAC.

My theory is: the rich. By owning the media, controlling social media algorithms, accumulating wealth at the expense of public services, and offering scarecrows. Simple recipe.

Just the existence of an algo that optimizes for engagement will eventually do this. Our little monkey brains freak out when they perceive something is being taken from them or they are confronted by the unknown. 'Immigrants taking stuff' is optimized reaction bait turbocharged by algos.

Pretty much. Also, people like to blame "the other." That's easier than having to look for fault in your friends, family, and self. Also, to quote George Carlin, "Think of how stupid the average person is...now remember HALF of them are STUPIDER than THAT!"

Because when the iron curtain fell, we thought they'd get a good dose of Western Culture and civility. Instead what happened was we got a near lethal dose of Russo-Chinese corruption and patrimonialism and their propaganda is designed to convince the stupidest segments of a given population.

Idk but perhaps related its interesting that Patrick Bateman memes took off during the Trump presidency becoming some post ironic figure of inspiration and in the book Trump is the only man Bateman looked up to. Makes me think about the rest of the internet and how propaganda works nowadays.

My theory is that it’s simply inequality Even if the poorest people are more comfortable compared to the past, people can’t buy new houses or cars or have as nice a house as prior generations at the same level So they look for easy answers since understanding systemic issues is much harder

Japans "left" political parties, including even Japan's communist party, is anti-populist. This leaves the populist issues unaddressed by the left as a prime territory to be claimed with malign solutions by the unopposed right dominating the messaging.

So in these places its a lack of left populism, particularly of the economic sort. The broad theory of that is that the socialist ideology behind left populism is ideologically impermissable in countries with capitalist primacy as years of self replication and reinforcement tighten those bounds.

Ascending fascism fits within the simplistic logic offered by capitalism's vulgar ideological framework of pure darwinian market control and applies to all else markets touch, which intensifies as more and more aspects of life marketize. This blurs the line of where the market logic ends.

Read Marx

These people have always thought like this, they're just comfortable saying it openly now. They used to try to be subtle about it, and the media would further cleanse it, so anyone not really paying attention, wouldn't notice. But the racists who hate everything, have always been there

Why, yes! *Home Rule:National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants* (Duke University Press, 2020), where I argue that hostility to “migrants” is bred in the bone of the national form of state sovereignty.

It's something that's happened again and again and again in one form or another countless times across countless countries. When things go bad, blame the Other. Sure, in some places and times the scapegoat is a religious or ethnic minority, but it's the same deal. No grand unified theory is needed.

Elon Musk’s twitter helps a lot

mass communication exposes a lot of things, and evil folks know if they can control the communications, they keep the narrative. for hitler it was radio and video. for us it's the internet. but it also has connected us to fight it. everything is waking up to where we really need to be: community

People are truly afraid of the truth and don't want to hear it. Technology is changing every process so fast that unless you re-skill continually, technology is taking your job. Its the machine that allows someone with no knowledge to make shoes that takes a cobblers job. Same with white-collar jobs

The IDU

Globalisation, driven by ubiquitous world-wide communication and transport links is merging all political systems into one. All 'conservative' parties are growing more and more cooperative, their positions merging as they shed local affections.

Yes: elites pushing for higher immigration everywhere. It's not complicated.

Because scapegoats and boogeymen will always help you figure out who the stupids are in the room

When people feel insecurity in life and worry about the future they start looking for someone to blame. Right wing movements are extremely good at scapegoating. Not at much else but they're very good at giving people someone to blame for life's problems.

Populations tend to have a popular source of information. Demographic specific or more general. People who wish to corrupt the system using whatever means corrupt these sources and begin to unravel reality for these people. Much like Fox has done. If they get enough outlets/demographics they win.

Turn one set against the outsider ideal and the remaining people who resisted xenophobia get turned against the xenophobes because they get an equally inflammatory/insular message from their "trusted" sources

I got nothin'

Piketty makes an attempt in Capital and Ideology: He believes the failure of social democratic governance to adjust its programs to meet the challenge of deindustrialization, increasingly competitive tertiary education and a globalized financial system has opened the door to RW nativism

It’s Facebook

facebook didn't exist in 1980 tho

Neat.

In addition the failure of communism following 1989 has increasingly made people feel that a more just inequality regime is basically impossible leading to zero-sum thinking on most economic issues

Kondylis mentions this in Mutation du Politique. The Soviet Union set out to champion the international proletariat and the United States championed universal human rights in order to stake something in the global. No more USSR + unimaginative left => liberalism collapses+no more trying for utopia

You really wouldn’t get a thread of reasoned debate like this on Twitter.

my pussy in bio, etc

Ah! But has anyone called anyone else a cuck? Then it's an echo chamber! Checkmate! /s

yeah, my guess is that some sort of socio-economic force like what Piketty suggests is at work here and stuff like tech/social media/pandemic has amplified/accelerated things

Had a discussion with ChatGPT about Piketty, Turchin, tech, the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the limitations of historical memory: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

All you have to add in is an information environment that is not just disinformational, but can (extremely cheaply): - make lots of money from making you v angry - beam examples of an out-group doing better than you, directly into your hand - let you immediately feel better by performing anger

They did these kinds of things in Nazi Germany too. But it isn’t money they’re after. It’s power. We’re no different than every other human society. And the tech isn’t the cause. It’s the humans. It’s always the humans.

Deindustrialization explains online racist propaganda?

I think he is seeking to explain the global rise of RW nationalism since the 1970s, he has a good bit to say on the National Front's rise as a backlash to Mitterand's government in 1980s France. I'm thinking of a very particular chapter in the back half to, let me see if I can get a good screen grab

Chapter 14: Border and Property The Construction of Equality's intro is a decent summation

Senescence. Countries are also living mortal organisms in every way that matters.

Also “cancer”

I believe this is the closest to a complete answer although I would be less dramatic. All the others are incomplete, akin to “smoking” or “microplastics “, and while they are causal to the system higher entropy and therefore damaging, the decay itself is preordained.

A few bad actors have poured millions and millions into propaganda campaigns.

Boomers are on their way out. They have the majority population for their entire lifetimes and are in a state of denial that time will move on without them.

Increasing education and prosperity have made philosophically consistent cradle liberals a major voting bloc in most democracies; we weren’t before. Cross-pressured voters used to support “sewer liberalism”, especially when times were hard; now they fear they’ve created a monster.

Internet +social media gives very village idiot an audience.

Look up: The Great Filter Theory 24 Hour “News” Cycle + Internet + Social Media + = 🌎🌍🌏’s Great Filter

Social media.

people are gullible and we migrated to a new info ecosystem. it's an easy narrative. it maybe even taps into some instinctive tribal reaction. we may have evolved otherism as warring tribes. going back as far as pre-hominid primate evolution

The rich and powerful are on a quest to hoard as much wealth as they can, and gain more and more control. They use their media empires to create division so the working class won't unite against them.

This cycle seems to repeat, the wealthy hoard more and more resources, the masses get angry, 1% tries to turn the masses against one another, either sweeping wars reduce the population or the masses force redistribution of assets to a momentarily more acceptable point. --Repeat.--

Everyone knows the world is going to become worse and worse every year and they can sense the catastrophe coming. Every one of these things is a super common human behavior throughout history. It would be better if we all got together to solve climate change but tribalism and extinction are real.

Ignorance.

- People "like" being indignant (angry with a sense of being wronged). - Technology means unlimited content available for consumption. - Over time people naturally choose content which makes them indignant: Blaming "Outsiders" for their problems. - More such content produced & repeat

It's incredibly easy to lie on the Internet and blow balloons full of smoke in a way never before seen. Just endless agitate people with issues that you just made up, or real social issues you simply pick the most simpleminded solution to. "Have you tried kill all the poor" as party policy.

Part of this is that we are about 250 years into a period of massive economic changes and population dynamics changes. Human experiences have been destabilized, resulting in a series of social fractures along existing weak points in society. People's lives fundamentaly different from their parents.

Historically, societies tended to be relatively slow to react to changes, until the pressure became too immense and fractures occurred. The social fracturing now is due mostly to people trying to artificially arrest or control the social realignments in ways not related to material conditions.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing to try and do, uncontrolled changes can be unimaginably violent and often don't solve the underlying problem for long, resulting in a long period of crisis. But totally arresting social changes or controling it without substantial public buy in is impossible.

It’s shit people can talk to scare overworked people into scapegoating someone for their aching back and utter inability to enjoy their existence.

People go tribalism-brained when shit is bad. Shit is currently bad everywhere, so people are going tribalism-brained everywhere.

Survival mode is going to spread more and more...

Has Japan ever been especially pro immigration? For the most part, the answer has been: no.

Well, no they haven't but that's exactly the point. They don't have a high immigration rate, how could immigrants be taking a meaningful amount of jobs?

One of several traditional anti immigrant arguments in Japan.

Good times creates incurious people who need things to do

Agreed, but also add pervasive anxiety. Disconnect. Also maybe some kind of universal FOMO where everyone is missing out, actually. Not so much on the good times, more on meaningful action.

This is it. People don't have enough to do to occupy their time and minds; too much leisure and nowhere near enough going on in the grey matter.

an excess of leisure tends to be very class dependent

Phones and social media being entirely algorithmically refined as propaganda machines.

Bingooo

It really is that damn phone

People are bad, and the only thing that constrains their badness is the shared social compact that we will ostracize them for acting out on their badness. If, instead, we grant them license to act out, they will.

All I know is humanity went through the Hundred Years War, Thirty Years war, Napoleonic wars & WW1 & just continued to throw itself back into the same behavior that caused them maybe 2-3 generations later. It’s us as a species, largely beautiful people selecting leaders who cause devastation.

Funny, I remember the end of the Spaceship Earth ride in Epcot, where the narrator extolled how the world is smaller and that "our news is their news, their news ours." In reality, it's more like "our bullshit is their bullshit, their bullshit ours."

📌

I mean if you look at the way fascism has been patterned historically, trump fell unconsciously into it

facebook helped, like, a lot. this is from 2016. excerpt from "Careless People", a book Zuck is trying to sue out of existence

i think its just an incredibly workable angle

what do you mean?

So the polisci version of fascism is basically a cluster of traits historically. And i think trump hit a lot of them before ever being advised to do so. Its just a human pattern that they work

some of it like anti-semitism in Japan, can maybe be more explained by recsys things or deliberate copying

For trump in polisci they made us go through an essay from 2010 defining fascism and its eerie. like often leaders are elites pretending to be outsiders. Obsessions with simultaneous strength and national decline. Blaming nebulous other

Effects of seemingly rapid technological and economic change, trends of growing inequality, socio/cultural upheaval and migration.. the most recent arrivals are easy targets as “other”. Copy paste and the details may differ but patterns are strong across history

right but I still don't see why this all happening at the same time like why did Xi pop up at this time as well? Sure China was always authoritarian but then Xi become president in 2013 and went full dictator "president for life" within ~ 5 years.

I mean in general at this moment, my current favourite theory is just pandemic + inflation

I think Xi is more complicated because thats a party story, and im not familiar with how that really works

I think rather than being a cause, pandemic + inflation was an accelerant the bonds of society were already slowly fraying before 2020

Neoliberal consensus is failing after a series of disastrous & largely unaddressed economic upheavals over the past couple decades, and multiple futile wars, highly visible inhumanity being made more and more salient with the ubiquity of the internet..

Contradictions made obvious. Material conditions worsening. People everywhere looking for simple, easy solutions, and leaders who promise to deliver them. Yeah, we've been in for this for a while.

probably couldve gone either way? idk i think we were in place where a lot of paths were open, and then in a place where possibilities are much more limited

Late stage capitalism & social media are good points, but also in the post-atomic era, humans have had fewer of the kind of "limited" wars which once allowed for more rapid political & demographic realignment. Also much less adventurous colonialism = fewer ways to remove "problem" men from society

smartphones + algorithmic social media owned by oligarchs

Yes. All neurotypical humans everywhere at all times are motivated by only two basic things: 1) desire to increase their own status/power/influence within their own gang(s) and 2) desire to see their gang(s) increase in status/power/influence relative to gangs they perceive as similar. So...

...polarization, Othering, xenophobia, nationalism, religious bigotry, etc are the default state of humanity. Liberalism is an anomalous state that has to be zealously defended. Post-WWII and during the Cold War it was. This global clash of "systems" acted as an external pressure within liberal...

...societies that both sublimated the basic desires among the populace (b/c people could satisfy them by taking a largely-symbolic side in the global conflict) and meant leaders could pursue status/power/influence by strengthening the liberal, law-like, institutions of national and international...

...systems. Once the Cold War ended and we reached "the end of history" the road to status/power/influence no longer ran that way, but in dismantling the (still far from perfect) liberal state and its cosmopolitan institutions and world views. It's taken 35 years for that process to reach Japan...

...not incidentally as the last of the people who remember what *actually happens* when we give in to the "monsters from the Id" are breathing their last. Summary: without external conditions that allow pro-liberal behavior to satisfy our basic desires, liberalism implodes into xenophobic populism.

Alan Greenspan did in his book Age of Turmoil

It’s capitalism losing regulatory guardrails so fewer people are amassing greater wealth. With that wealth they are influencing legislation or corruptly buying politicians to tilt the playing field even more. Thus the rest of us are getting lower wages, less job stability & fewer public services.

Online is overtaking real life -- they personally are fine, these things don't impact them -- but they hear about stuff online and assume that's real and their life is the exception

Oligarchs pouring literally billions of dollars into promoting these movements These far right movements are a front for overwhelming, widespread organized crime

There has been a good bit of immigration in many countries due to different conflicts, political upheaval, or struggling economies. People see more "others" in the area, they start hearing comments from people about it, negative stories in the news or social media. Conservative media big reason.

You light the embers of hate and send out the windbags to grow the flames. It's a method proven multiple times in history. Propaganda works.

bsky.app/profile/mike...

That's the 'weak men create hard times' idea but the right wingers don't realise they're the weak men creating hard times.

Brett Devereaux has a fascinating series on his blog regarding the myth of the "weak man create hard times" and it is really illuminating for how it applies to the current destruction of fair resource allocation will destroy us: acoup.blog/category/col...

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide" - John Adams

and this explains The Matrix

Stenner & Haidt (2018): "[The theory of the] authoritarian dynamic posits that intolerant behavior is a function of the interaction of an enduring psychological predisposition [30% of population is authoritarian] with transient environmental conditions of normative threat." polpsy.ca/wp-content/u...

Ref: "Authoritarianism is not a momentary madness, but an eternal dynamic within liberal democracies" In C. R. Sunstein (ed.), 'Can it happen here? Authoritarianism in America', 2018 www.karenstenner.com

There's grievances, but they are ALL driven by the rich and their corporations

Overcrowding, food insecurity, job insecurity, affordability crises, overstrained infrastructure, badly eroded services. It has a cumulative effect that forces people into survival mode and as they see demographic change happening so quickly they are provided a convenient target. Competition.

All stresses that were predicted would happen if we ignored our impact on the environment. I think 'the evil incarnate', WEF, in their Global Risks reports, have been trying to warn us for about 20 years. The WEF report headline this year: "bleak outlook for the decade"

The reckoning has started and countries are going to have to reverse course on this very quickly just to cool things down so that their governments aren't overthrown or devolves into fascism like a certain country.

Capitalism requires an underclass, and globalization (theoretically) would offshore that class, creating massive wealth for the First World. But then, the mechanism to spread wealth to a growing middle class was erased, so the middle class shrunk and there were no working class jobs stateside

Roughly the % of people predisposed to authoritarianism.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Authoritarian personality theory and studies show this is pretty consistent % of the population that can be grown by right wing authoritarian leaders

Inevitable endpoint of late-stage capitalism? Low-hanging fruit's long gone and actual innovation is not exponential like prior booms. Leads politicians and their donor class to squeeze workers harder for each percent of growth with xenophobic misdirection and authoritarianism as the crisis deepens

Japan is also a colonial power that has since its fall had racism towards the Chinese and Korean communities that live there

Yes. The Cell Phone.

social media is definitely part of it

Not needing to work (mentally or physically) to learn any information, has poisoned the wells of both learning, and of information. Social media is a byproduct of that, one of many negatives the Phone with its portable internet has given us.

Hive mentality is still a thing in Japan.

You don’t need to be worried about Japan when you don’t even understand the history of your own country, dude 😂

You left my questions unanswered. That’s rude…

Dugin-Sukov

Not a GUT, but ideas are contagious, both good ones like MeToo and evil ones like "hate hard on immigrants, they're the problem".

Umberto Eco's Fascim Bingo explains it. Brought to you by people who want to go back to the 19th century.

There it is: (P.S. as with other stuff, Italians didn't invent it, just made it popular.) bsky.app/profile/bure...

A never ending story. youtu.be/lHytjEj7B9g?...

Fundamental unease at the repressed awareness that the relative ease and peace of the Global North is maintained through the partition, exploitation, and suffering of the Global South.

bsky.app/profile/shak...

I think there is another chapter after that. As the soviet union dissolved, the ruling class of the Western bloc stopped being afraid that a competitor could challenge them. So, the ruling class just stopped caring if institutions were prone to fall apart from internal looting.

I am not saying that the Western nations weren't corrupt before the mid 90s. But, I think that the elites were sane enough to know that bad stuff happens when you strip the wires from the walls. I don't think they care anymore

It’s all to divert attention from the real cause of all the shit we’re experiencing. Unbridled wealth abuse.

So we made a direct route into people’s brains and decided to leave it unregulated then let a Nazi buy it and hostile actors use it for psyops.

Everywhere has billionaires.

5GW by ruZZia and China. Basically, a long-term disinfo campaign intent on destabilization of democracy.

Social media is an outrage amplification machine.

Right wing capitalists use it to make money. They see it working elsewhere and adopt the strategy.

It’s called “Humans were a mistake”