Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "How Meloni Became the Most Popular EU Leader" video.

  1. That's just how dumb people are, nothing really new. Conservatives and proto fascists always start that way... most politicians in fact do, particularly ones occupying the position for the first time. Nothing rallies a crowd more than a manipulative sociopath. It's the effect of political propaganda. Whoever is elected invested a ton on propaganda, and these days it's usually about FUD, "defeating the enemy", magical solutions for imaginary problems, promising to solve all the issues past administrations had, appealing to fanatics, "being bold" enough to run their mouths off uncontrollably, "breaking the mold", yadda yadda. It seems that also people have a morbid fascination for figure who won't admit mistakes, always shove responsibility for problems on the enemy, and then use victimization as a tool claiming political persecution, witch hunt and whatnot when they get defeated somehow. It's necessary to keep the image of an infallible being that simply does not exist among us. The more confused and anxious people are about the future, the more they'll blindly listen and follow sweet talkers. And these days you have tons upon tons of anxious, confused and ignorant people around to work with. Perhaps ignorant has always been the case, but anxiety might be on a whole other level these days. This is, btw, how Hitler came to power, in case some people don't know. Mussolini too. Culture has vilified those politicians to a point people think about them as pure evil, some supernatural power who took things over by force, not actual politicians who also rose to power with plenty of popular support. Romanticization and fictionalization of them also did a disservice for history and cultures to the point they forget how much support these politicians had to amass the power they ended up with. It's not about a single figure, a party, or a movement that happened far in the past and will never happen again. It's people. The collective actions of people led to events like mass killings, genocide, concentration camps, and some of the worst atrocities humanity ever committed against itself. We are oh so very quick to forget the share of responsibility people had over all of these, because we don't want to think we are capable of it. But we are. Problem is, politics shouldn't be a popularity contest, even though it totally is, has been, and will likely remain being for a very long time. It's analogous to clickbait effect. People value that over content, people value popularity of politicians over what their government produced, and so we keep repeating the same old mistakes. Sometimes we are lucky and things coincide with good government, sometimes we are not so lucky and popular figures remain popular despite effectively destroying the country. People in general are just extremely bad judges for systems... and they think they are good judges for character, but they aren't. We're just not built to absorb the multitude of information needed to make a neutral assessment of something as large as a government body and accomplishments. Most of us aren't even equipped to think about what politicians say beyond primitive feelings, beyond personal prejudices, beyond superficial consequences. To be clear, it's still far better than autocracies, dictatorships, totalitarian regimes or anarchy, but democracies are not perfect, they will always live together with the tragedy of the commons. A decision by majority does not always make it right, or even elects what is best for all or even most, because a decision by majority is not always a decision by rationality, or decision by reasoning, or by good information. At best it's a decision of what most people think they want or against what the collective fears, sometimes it's a decision of least worst, at worst it can be a decision made by a dominant type of misinformation, hatred, prejudice or ill informed preconceptions. So, in the end, popularity doesn't mean much. You can see it in the list presented in the beginning of the video... there are politicians covering the entire spectrum of politics there.
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