lkrubner

In late 1945 the exchange rate was 360 yen to 1 dollar. If that was good in 1945 then it should be good in 2026 because nothing ever changes.

The Iliad was written after the classical era of Bronze Age Egypt, so no classical age mummy could be buried with the Iliad because it didn't exist yet.

No, it is exactly the same thing. The tax on cassettes raised money that was given to artists.

Nothing you said is true. The fact that you didn't name a single person is an example of the style of reasoning that has increasingly shaped USA discourse over the last 60 years. If you don't have specifics then you are simply giving into the trend towards distrust. Since 1960 every institution in the USA has been made more transparent and more directly democratic and yet this has done nothing to increase trust in those institutions. The distrust comes first and the distrust does not reference anything in reality. If Americans are more worried about corruption when corruption is decreasing then something is going on in the minds of Americans which does not have a correspondence with any external reality. Likewise, Americans are increasingly convinced that crime is increasing when every statistic we have shows that the crime wave lasted from 1960 to 1990 and has been in decline since 1990. Again, that Americans are more worried about crime when crime is decreasing shows that the concern about crime is being driven by something other than crime. The distrust comes first. The distrust shapes people's perception, separate from facts. The distrust shapes people's narratives, in opposition to the facts.

The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.

From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.

“Ireland offers long-term grants for artists” is how this would have been written 50 years ago.

The idea is not new, only the rhetoric.

I don't think this is a great article, as I think it focuses too much on the Washington Post, but there are some issues that will have to be addressed in American democracy.

National democracy is built on top of local democracy, in the sense of local self-rule -- if local democracy is dying then national democracy will tend to die, but if local democracy is thriving, national democracy is largely guaranteed.

About local democracy:

1. Local city government is now less accountable because of the death of local newspapers. The public must have some idea what politicians are doing, but without local newspapers there is no one to report what is happening at the local level.

2. This is related to people (since the 1960s) losing interest in local government. When I was a child my parents both served in the local government, I remember being 7 years old and getting taken to meetings where the room was packed. But when I was 42 I drove my mom to a town meeting and I was shocked to see that the room was empty, literally, there was not a single citizen who had come out for the meeting that evening. The only people in the room were the politicians (all of whom were volunteers, as it was an unpaid position -- they were civically minded citizens).

3. Local democracy worked best when families stayed in one town for generations, and so had a long-term commitment to the health of the town. But the modern life-style, even for the middle class who are the most likely to serve in government, involves buying a starter home in one town, then a bigger home for a family (in another town), then a retirement home, possibly in another state. Most families now assume they will only be in a given town for 10 or 20 years, so their focus tends to be on minimal taxes, rather than long-term investments in the town.

4. For local government, possible solutions include abolishing local democracy and making the positions appointed (most roles are already appointed, of course) from the state level, or making the towns much larger (a large percentage of a given state) or limiting voting to those who pass some test, or who demonstrate citizenship by volunteering some time, or by having frequent elections to a staggered city council (as frequent voting tends to reward the few citizens who are highly active).

Anyone who thinks these moves are anti-democratic should remember that local government elections tend to only get 15% to 20% participation rates, so most of the public has already voluntarily disenfranchised itself.

Any democracy will automatically be the democracy of those who show up. There is no democracy for the truly apathetic. But local and regional self-rule can remain strong so long as citizens who are active in civic affairs can continue to exercise rule at the local level, without being blocked those who are non-active.

There remains a controversy whether "democracy" means "the right to vote" or "a population engaged in self-government." That is, does "democracy" refer to "self expression via voting" or does it refer to actual government arising from the local population? Those who feel that "democracy" means "self expression" tend to think of themselves as consumers rather than citizens, they see themselves as buying government services (with taxes) rather than the producers of government. But local self-rule does not survive for long in areas where people see themselves mostly as consumers of government services. Local self-rule survives thanks to the civically minded citizens who are willing to volunteer their time to creating governance.

They went from $559.36 to $132 a month on Hetzner, and they seem happy about the performance. This matches my own experience as well, I have been stunned regarding Hetzner and how cheap it can be.

Why do volunteer firefighters rush into a burning building to try to save children from some family they have never met before? Every day we afforded examples of people sacrificing their personal interests for the benefit of others.

But also, biologists usually use a definition of "altruism" that does not include close kin. Richard Dawkins was explicit about this in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene." Helping someone you are directly related to is not considered altruism.

I tried to read this, but it's just gibberish. I cannot figure out what you are trying to say. Obviously Putin leads the international right-wing movement. This is well known. I have to assume you have some deep emotional commitment to being contrarian. You are attempting to jump through a lot of mental hoops to transform Putin into a Communist. You will, I hope, understand that most of us don't want to twist ourselves into a mental and emotional pretzel to end up with your deeply contrarian position. "Leftwing" and "rightwing" are always situational terms that depend, in any era, on a prevailing consensus, therefore there is no point trying to twist the meaning of the words, except in cases where you can point to a specific contradiction between the conventional label and some actual policy, and even then, most of the contradictions should taken as wry ironies, as we all know the old adage, "Politics makes strange bedfellows."

You are making up your own, personal definition of genocide. But "genocide" has a specific definition under international law, and it is a crime of intent. Israel clearly had no intent to permanently remove the people of Gaza, since Israel was happy to sign a ceasefire as soon as they could get their hostages back. Everything else that occurred is just ordinary war. Without the intent to permanently erase a culture or a people, it cannot be genocide under the law, since the intent is missing.

There is the separate issue of war crimes. Some commanders in the IDF may not have shown due caution towards civilians. That will eventually be adjudicated in the courts. But that is a separate charge and has nothing to do with genocide.

I remain baffled why some people want to take the various charges that could be made against Israel and conflate all of the charges with the charge of genocide. The charge of genocide has become deeply attractive to a large number of people, even when other charges would be easier to prove and have more evidence to support them. But for some reason "war crime" is not as attractive as "genocide" and so supporters of the people of Gaza have developed an emotional commitment to fighting for the charge which they cannot possibly prove, because events have undermined their narrative.