I love this analogy. It’s hardly a crime to kick my lawnmower until it starts to come apart. Vandalism at best. If you want to entirely dehumanize these people, at least go all the way.
That was a reference to a Bryan Cantril speech, and it's more about the lawnmower's ability to gravely harm your person without having any intent or feeling beyond doing what a lawnmower does.
> At the end of the day you either recognize these problems and appreciate that trusting your electorate/having a liberal democracy is the best option we have compared with the alternatives…or you don’t.
Many of those democracies are trending illiberal thanks to the useless yet arrogant liberal decrying of “there’s simply nothing else we can do” and championing a rotting status quo.
They are trending illiberal because of the tension between elites who think ignoring and censoring the popular will on various issues is wise and the voters who see that and think the only solution is a drastic one.
Several western countries could kill their more extreme parties overnight simply by enacting a few reforms with immigration and/or affordability.
It’s admittedly been a long time since I looked at a local newspaper, but I do seem them occasionally. Kinda seems like the local ones are just the local news segment in text format. Fine, but I can read that on my phone or watch it on the TV with much more convenience. Maybe there’s some interesting stuff left in classified ads or whatnot, but a lot of that shit so on marketplace now.
Local is where getting the news is the hardest. My local school board meets at the same time as the local zoning board...
My town publishes city meeting minutes - "debated to change zoning regulations in [development], it passed 2-3". What changes were made? What were the debate points? Once I get that information who do I vote for/against in the next election if I care about the change.
I really want a local news paper that covers the above types of things. I can't find it and in turn I have no idea who to vote for. Town positions are partizan so I at least I know democrat/republican (for whatever that means...). I also know all candidates are married and have kids - and the family picture was taken by someone who knows how to make them look good. They all will "fight for me" as well, but never do they promise anything that might be controversial (unlike their opponent - they are obviously biased against their opponent and yet they are my best source of information about their opponent)
National news I will hear about and I can form opinions. However local it is much harder. The newspapers I have access to are not helping.
If you're lucky, you'll have a motivated local blogger who attends the meetings and posts reports. If you do, throw them a few bucks in whatever way they accept payments. The local paper used to send a reporter to do that but they only have a couple of actual reporters working now.
The unfortunate part is that while a lot of people might want that information, few will pay for it. I ran a small company's paywall, like this was a small chain of local papers. We could barely give the subscriptions away.
I used to feel that way, but I've come back around to finding it easier to read the news in the actual paper. For once, I'm not going to get distracted by a text or email notification. But more importantly, there's no cookie notification to dismiss, there's no autoplay video ad that somehow got around my pihole and ublock origin, there's no subscription nag flyout, and I don't have to log in every time despite clicking on "Remember me."
Plus, there's the visual cue to those around me that I'm not just idly scrolling, I'm actually looking at something.
I love this analogy. It’s hardly a crime to kick my lawnmower until it starts to come apart. Vandalism at best. If you want to entirely dehumanize these people, at least go all the way.