
2019: The year revolt went global - zby
https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/2019/12/10/2019-the-year-revolt-went-global/
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Miner49er
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.

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dcolkitt
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.

~~~
Miner49er
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.

Here's an article criticizing the media for not covering it:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/13/hundreds-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/13/hundreds-
iraqis-have-been-killed-medias-silence-is-deafening/)

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siavosh
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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AnimalMuppet
Maybe the masses are saying "This isn't working for us! We don't know what
would work for us, but _this isn 't it!_"

And I wonder how long until this comes to the USA...

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larnmar
It already did, in 2016.

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AnimalMuppet
That's an interesting take on both Trump's and Bernie's campaigns. To at least
some degree, I think it fits.

But I was thinking about several percent of the country marching in the
streets. That's not something we've seen yet.

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m0zg
>> several percent of the country marching in the streets

Unlikely to happen here seeing that unemployment is at a 50 year low and wages
are rising.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
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.

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nopriorarrests
>Hong Kong isn't hurting

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?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
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.

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dragonwriter
Hence, the rise in both authoritarian and progressive populism in the US.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
"Authoritarian" and "progressive" are not mutually exclusive. See, for
example, Venezuela.

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dragonwriter
“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.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
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.

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ilaksh
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](https://youtu.be/5C43i3yclec)

Basically we are entering a global depression due to untenable debt levels.
WWIII is a distinct possibility.

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larnmar
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.

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airstrike
Agreed. If anything, the Arab Spring was much bigger than the current set of
unrelated protests

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munificent
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?

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Infinitesimus
> 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

~~~
lidHanteyk
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.

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paulpauper
>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.

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malandrew
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.

