@desafinado sure, but both apply. personalism is a way of thinking that emphasizes the person and personal as key to understanding more broadly. in this sense, using a personal narrative as means of exploring and expressing ones political project is quite personalist. when we talk about a personalist leader, we conflate support of a person with support of a political project. the two senses are not the same, but they are not unrelated.
@marick @scott I really, really yearn for that kind of democracy. Without human access to representatives, it all loses form.It isn’t practical for us to be personally acquainted with US Presidents, but for legislatures and assemblies at a state and local level absolutely (though we might consider dividing bigger states), and i even play with ideas at the federal level. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9069.html
Parties once helped fill this role. But, ha!
@Lampa there are, but are they competing exactly? there’s a lot of admiration and fealty expressed by pretty much all of them, not to a platform or a party, but to a person.
@csweatpants I have some similar hobbyhorses, but about the scale of locality. I think the base level of democracy should mean so local that everyone interested personally interacts with representatives and officials at that level. Without that gateway, it is difficult to meaningfully participate. Impersonal tokens (votes, donations) are subject to so much manipulation. 1/
@csweatpants Politics should be an art of collective creation, not individual preference expression, not A/B testing of people isolated behind screens. /fin
@kentwillard to be fair, the contemporary Republican party has pretty fully acknowledged Iraq, not just with loose words but with some degree of accountability. none of that war’s protagonists have any place in Trump’s party. indeed some have become quite partisan Democrats (while retaining conservative views and commitments).
so many personalist narratives, from the party offering the alternative to personalist autocracy.
it suggests we’re in a pretty dangerous place, i think. parasocial attachment seems more in tension with than supportive of deliberative democracy. even when the object of attachment is not a wannabe dictator dick.
who has coopted whom?
i guess i must be weird, but among the least interesting things in politics to me are people’s inspiring personal stories.
i do have to confess, though, i think Kamala’s mom has the best name ever. Shamala. i just love the sound of it.
i wish there were less talk of breaking ceilings and more talk of raising floors.
@quixote when you go for supremacy, you’re more likely to get the hierarchy than the place you’d anticipated within it.
@quixote i remember! i wasn’t as opposed to encroaching commercialization of the internet as i should have been. i was at least aware enough to be mad about the crazy Clinton-era IP power grabs, the Mickey Mouse act and DMCA. but i still thought Google was the good guys!
in retrospect, i was kind of an idiot. at least there are some constants in life.
@Canecittadino@mastodon.world Only the future will tell, but I sure like to hope we’re still tabula rosa enough to remedy what we’ve broken and create something better than all the warts that were. We definitely have plenty to work on. I’m glad to sing on the same choir.
The price mechanism was broken not by communists with price controls but by market enthusiasts, when they allowed purchasing power to diverge very far from rough equality, which undermines completely the normative case for price rationing.
@Canecittadino@mastodon.world No offense, but I recommend more atheism. Our duty is to make a decent world for everyone today — included the people we and our forebears historically excluded and abused. But that is the only payment due. We are not bound to suffer because our predecessors sinned.
@Canecittadino@mastodon.world every thing you say is true, but everything is relative. something broke over the last two decades to a degree it wasn’t broken before.
A provocative graph from a provocative essay by @blair_fix, “From Commodity to Asset: The Truth Behind Rising House Prices” https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/08/22/from-commodity-to-asset-the-truth-behind-rising-house-prices/
A graph showing that, (even) at the 10th percentile of US income, income grew faster than consumer goods (consumer goods prices fell relative to incomes) until 1980, when the pattern reverses and consumer prices rise faster than 10th percentile incomes.
from #ZephyrTeachout https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/economists-kamala-harris-price-gouging/679547/
Text: The other big problem with the textbook economics take on price gouging is the assumption that temporarily higher-priced products will find their way to the people who value them the most. That might be true in a world where everyone had the same amount of money to spend. In the world we actually inhabit, that is not the case. During a power outage, a working-class cancer patient who desperately needs to buy the last generator in stock to keep his medications refrigerated might not be able to outbid a healthy millionaire who just wants to run their air conditioner.
When people talk about how all the big social networks are US, Silicon Valley firms, they overlook OnlyFans. cf @drewharwell https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/onlyfans-bryce-adams-top-earners-creator-economy/
@ralph058 Perhaps I expect too much. I’ve frankly never before sat through nearly the whole, four-night extravaganza before.
From my perspective, the stakes are exceedingly high. If it is unreasonable that my expectations should match them, I guess I can’t help that my hopes do.