Is Right-wing populism beginning to lose steam?

[bilateralrope]

just like having an electronic panopticon is the least-horrifying solution to the proliferation of modern biotech and the ability to create synthetic plagues that equal or surpass those originally created by nation-states.

Please prove that somebody has the capability to sort through all that data to provide useful intelligence. Because collecting it is no use without the algorithms to process it.

[Ralin]

You know you've gone off the rails when applying the Shep Solutiontm is less bad than the proposed solution.

Hey man, hey. I didn't say anything about nukes or bombing. Just going door to door, gunning down people who don't toe the line.

[aerius]

Hey man, hey. I didn't say anything about nukes or bombing. Just going door to door, gunning down people who don't toe the line.

Not you, I'm talking 'bout the dude who wants to do the Trail of Tears with everyone who lives in a city.

[GrosseAdmiralFox]

Or you could just have a better investment in the quality of life for rural citizens, instead of a dystopic power fantasy.

Problem is that you can't invest in something that no one will use. The cities -particularly the mega-cities- have hit a critical mass that basically makes it impossible to simply use the carrot solution to solve.

Or we could do the non-crazy thing and provide more support and aid for people in shitty rural areas with no economic or political future to move to more prosperous urban areas. Alternately, if we want to toss rights out the window we could use our heavily armed police and military to brutally massacre rural communities that commit terrorism and insurrection or otherwise get out of line. That would probably be unethical, but it would still be simpler, more effective and less radical than massively changing society in authoritarian fashion by stripping people of basic things like the right to move about freely and decide where they want to live.

That is only going to cause problems because no one is tending the fields. That means food riots a plenty...

What the fuck are you even talking about with this Clancy shit?

Because it's a fucking reality, that's why.

[Gandalf]

Or you could just have a better investment in the quality of life for rural citizens, instead of a dystopic power fantasy.

Problem is that you can't invest in something that no one will use. The cities -particularly the mega-cities- have hit a critical mass that basically makes it impossible to simply use the carrot solution to solve.

Increase the quality of life out there and people will use them. Small towns are popular, but people leave them because the prospects are poor. Improve the prospects and watch people come back.

[Ralin]

Problem is that you can't invest in something that no one will use. The cities -particularly the mega-cities- have hit a critical mass that basically makes it impossible to simply use the carrot solution to solve.

No they haven't. What the hell does 'mega-city' even mean? And why are they simultaneously supreme titans of economic and political power and utterly unable to deal with more residents?

That is only going to cause problems because no one is tending the fields. That means food riots a plenty...

Or you could pay a small number of people a decent amount of money to live out in farm country all or part of the time while letting rural communities that don’t serve a good economic purpose dry up as people move away.

Because it's a fucking reality, that's why.

No it isn’t you moonbat. Billy Joe Bob cooking up Super Bubonic Aids to own the libs is exactly as much of a paranoid fantasy as when people were talking about Al-Qaeda doing it.

[Zwinmar]

The question is: Why are the prospects in rural areas so bad? Is it because of high taxation on everything so no one can actually own their own piece of land, is it something else?

[Jub]

The question is: Why are the prospects in rural areas so bad? Is it because of high taxation on everything so no one can actually own their own piece of land, is it something else?

It's a lack of job density and diversity combined with a lack of services, especially in the US, which makes people move away from smaller cities to larger ones.

I myself moved from Kelowna a city with a metropolitan population of ~195,000 to Vancouver a city with a metropolitan population of 2.46 million. I did it because Kelowna didn't seem to offer me a solid career path and lacked a lot of social events that I was looking for. Prices between Vancouver and Kelowna aren't so different so unlike many people I wasn't giving up cheap living for city conveniences.

At the very least you'd need to make sure that flyover cities/towns in the US get basic shit like proper highspeed internet and have job prospects that aren't farming, manufacturing, or service industry based. That's hard to do because it's just not cost effective to decentralize a business or run fiber to the degree needed to fix things. Outside of massive grants and other incentives to get services and business into smaller population centers, the trend will be for populations to migrate from lower density areas to higher density ones unless they have a very good reason to stay put.

[Vendetta]

That is only going to cause problems because no one is tending the fields. That means food riots a plenty...

One of the big reasons that rural areas are shitty in the USA is that automation and industrialisation of agriculture has already removed all the jobs.

A hundred years ago, farmers were 27% of the US labour force. Now it's only just over 2%. Outputs are up, but direct on-farm employment is down to 10% of what it was.

A similar thing has happened in the other big rural industry, mining. In 1920 there were 862,000 coal miners in America. Today there are 81,000. But coal output is about the same at ~700m tons per year.

No-one is tending the fields now, because modern farming doesn't need them as much. They're still there, but the jobs aren't.

But no-one's done anything about that because a litany of mostly conservative politicians has forged a strong identity between rural and coal and farming jobs which will never come back no matter how hard you deregulate, because they weren't lost to regulation but to automation.

[LaCroix]

Same for machining jobs - many people worked these shops fixing broken stuff... These days, things are fixed with spare parts that come of the sameproduction automated lines as extra parts.

Barely anybody would try fixing a broken hydraulic cylinder or a fixture - you buy a new one, it's cheaper than paying the man-hours to fix the broken part.

[Tribble]

In a way that's better though, isn't it? Wouldn't having high population density areas and leaving the rest for agriculture / the environment be better than spreading everyone out and making urban sprawl even worse than it already is? Also, wouldn't there be economies of scale, particularly when it comes to modern infrastructure like roads, pipes, electric lines etc?

[K. A. Pital]

Well, the consequences of elimination of industrial worker jobs by automation and outsourcing to "dirtier" lands are the creation of a new servant class.

The so-called "service sector" is mostly just servants of various kinds, who are also in the danger of being automated out of work every day, too, because even their rock-bottom wages are becoming too expensive when the right technology is introduced. "Services" is shitty jobs which don't pay well, a large share of them nothing but precarious employment, and with rising costs of living, costs of housing etc. these workers are bound to become victims of a poverty trap.

[madd0ct0r]

The creation of the large service sector was the result of people having cash abd the willing ability to pay for a skilled result (hairdressers), or being so time poor they are happy to pay for a service (cleaners/dogwalkers) or being physically in need of help (disabled support worker).

Most of it is work that was done without compensation by family members to the best of their ability. Emancipation and both parents working created the buyers and needy for the service sector.

The ongoing current precariat is not a symptom that service jobs are bad in and of themselves - its that the short term profit motive and confusing that with righteousness is driving societies to make stupid short term decisions too

[K. A. Pital]

Emancipation or a new enslavement? Previously one wage earner could support an entire family, nowadays it is very hard, at least in the industrialized nations.

Is it a choice to work, or are people being forced to work because the purchasing power of wages collapsed faster than what inflation rates would suggest ?

Also, „without compensation“ is a misnomer when applied to a functional family, which - at least as I see it - is a commune, where each contributes to the common household his/her labour, and the end result of the collective labour is allocated based on needs.

[GrosseAdmiralFox]

Increase the quality of life out there and people will use them. Small towns are popular, but people leave them because the prospects are poor. Improve the prospects and watch people come back.

Nope, the mega-cities have hit a sort of critical mass that makes power -be economic or political- flow into them no matter what carrot solution you can do. You can make all the improvements in the world and you're likely to see things still flow into the mega-cities because infrastructure is just that cheap and the profit margins are just that high.

In a way that's better though, isn't it? Wouldn't having high population density areas and leaving the rest for agriculture / the environment be better than spreading everyone out and making urban sprawl even worse than it already is? Also, wouldn't there be economies of scale, particularly when it comes to modern infrastructure like roads, pipes, electric lines etc?

Problem is that we're dealing with humans, and humans have this tendency to have more ideology, faith, or literal outright stupidity than sense... and that is going to be the problem, especially if they start making anywhere outside the urban areas into essentially rural Afghanistan at best.

[bilateralrope]

Where do you plan to get the land to house people outside of cities ?

What current use of the land do you think is less important than housing all those people you have forced out of cities ?

[K. A. Pital]

Where do you plan to get the land to house people outside of cities ?

What current use of the land do you think is less important than housing all those people you have forced out of cities ?

Landed estates of the elite, hunting grounds and such (for the record, I do not think that destroying large cities in such a way is even necessary, and in any case ending the colossal property speculation cannot be thought of in isolation from other measures to socialize living...)

[Gandalf]

Increase the quality of life out there and people will use them. Small towns are popular, but people leave them because the prospects are poor. Improve the prospects and watch people come back.

Nope, the mega-cities have hit a sort of critical mass that makes power -be economic or political- flow into them no matter what carrot solution you can do. You can make all the improvements in the world and you're likely to see things still flow into the mega-cities because infrastructure is just that cheap and the profit margins are just that high.

The Seachange phenomenon in Australia would disagree. Moving from city to country is a popular idea, to the point where coastal rural towns have recorded higher rates of growth than varied cities. These towns offer things that cities don't and can't, driving up their desirability.

[bilateralrope]

Where do you plan to get the land to house people outside of cities ?

What current use of the land do you think is less important than housing all those people you have forced out of cities ?

Landed estates of the elite, hunting grounds and such

I doubt that's enough land.

(for the record, I do not think that destroying large cities in such a way is even necessary, and in any case ending the colossal property speculation cannot be thought of in isolation from other measures to socialize living...)

Unfortunately, GrosseAdmiralFox sounds serious and allergic to evidence.

[The Romulan Republic]

A useful litmus test for whether you think the quoted article is correct is the upcoming Israeli election. It will be a prime example of how well a right-wing populist with nationalist/extremist rhetoric and ties is able to overcome scandal and legal scrutiny to win an election. Bibi is more low key than Trump and many others, but he has been at a similar game for a long time.

Well, it looks like Netanyahu has won another term, although it was a very close race and there may be lengthy negotiations over the composition of his coalition:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/netanyahu ... -1.5091685

I wonder how much Donald handing him the Golan on a silver platter helped with that.

[Ace Pace]

I wonder how much Donald handing him the Golan on a silver platter helped with that.

Entirely irrelevant.
His victory was entirely based on a good GOTV, a fear mongering campaign and lack of viable alternatives.