Afaik, It was lobbies and conservative goverents that chose to put the question up to the "free market", completely disregarding the fact that the competing geographies where heavily subsidizing those industries.
I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening. The risk is that one day, you wake up and there is no democracy any more.
Reading the news and being informed are two separate things. Being an informed citizen, the kind that democracies need to survive, also requires 1) being informed of history and 2) understanding issues in depth.
People who consume a lot of news tend to have very shallow understanding of a broad range of current events. Worse they tend to be passive receivers of news instead of active seekers of information with intent to understand the world.
As a result, they are very susceptible to manipulation through selection of what makes the news they tend to consume. They become passive pawns in political power struggles.
I'd like to get a little pedantic here and suggest it's not reading the news that's so problematic, it's 1) watching it, and 2) scrolling it. Not that print can't be effective propaganda, but it's less optimized to the task than 1 and 2. The passive pawns can't get enough of either.
On one hand I can see where you can draw this argument from. But on the other hand I don't think daily consumption of the huge quantity of news that exists is necessary for having a decent political opinion, especially given that most news is inflammatory junk (at least in my country). I just don't need a 5 page breakdown of every single event that some corpo decided to shove down our throats.
Also - and maybe I'm naive for this - I don't really need news to inform my political opinion because the current state of affairs is so far from my ideal world. Like no matter what could reasonably occur in the news, I still know who I'm voting for on polling day.
> I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening.
The point being made by the author is that "following the news" nowadays has nothing to do with being informed. Instead, it became about being constantly bombarded by a barrage of noise and nonsense to constantly grab your attention.
So instead, by finding a monthly publication giving him an overview of the local, European and world news, the author is looking for a filter removing all the unnecessary noise. And the month granularity should be more than enough to allow him to be informed about important changes.
I completely agree. The author is incredibly naive on the "I asked myself how much of this actually affects my daily life". If there's one thing that absolutely affects your life, it's politics. Maybe not today, and maybe not immediately in a meaningful way, but it will affect you.
I completely disagree. The past 50-70yr of "people ought to care and be involved" type sentiment has resulted in mostly only the people who have nothing better to do and no serious problems having an outsize effect and in some subject areas completely dominating the political discourse to the detriment of literally everyone else and western society generally.
You mangled Jefferson a bit. He wrote about education, not news. He didn't imagine the the non-stop firehose of slop and advertising and propaganda we endure and call news. What passes for news today describes the opposite of critical thinking and education.
No evidence supports your sentiment. Find an example of democracy that arose from citizens "being informed about what's happening." The Athenians limited democratic participation to a small educated elite. The American Founders had the same instinct, excluding more people than they included.
Demoracy dies in front of our eyes right now, in the USA, the most media-saturated culture in history. You might blame that on an ignorant and uncritical population. You might call them uninformed, or misinformed. As Jefferson understood the problem doesn't come from people not reading the news, but rather people not educated enough to understand, think critically, or even care.
I feel like this, I honestly wish newspapers weren't bunk and there was a good "week in review" way to get the news. I find myself Doom scrolling to much.
The fact that this is downvoted really says it all. "I don't read the news" is pretty much dependent on one's profession being insulated from changing events. Which is not surprising why it's a popular opinion amongst technocrats that would rather not have democracy in the first place.
For the rest of the news, I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months. This kind of format filters out short-term noise and fear-driven stories.
Elections happen even less frequently than this. If your democracy disintegrates with less than a few months of warning, you were probably invaded and noticed even without the news; At this point, that would probably lead to a civil emergency notification on your phone, and by design that happens even without any apps installed.
As we said in the UK in my childhood, "Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip* paper".
In October 2024 I would not have guessed that we'd ever see masked agents killing people on the streets of major US cities, or the US administration immediately accusing the victims of being armed terrorists. Things can change rapidly. By allowing things to get this bad, we have unfortunately forfeited our right to pretend things can't change rapidly. Let's plug in; fix this situation; and then folks can go back to ignoring the news.
Last year, legal immigrants were fine. Today, their kids are kidnapped and used as bait to take them to Alcatraz. And that's not even the identity I'm mostly referring to.
Very cool stance OOP, thank you for identifying yourself as the type of centrist heaven will reject at the gate and angels will never get tired of the reaction to the shrug.
When learning basic math, you shouldn't use a calculator, because otherwise you aren't really understanding how it works. Later, when learning advanced math, you can use calculators, because you're focusing on a different abstraction level. I see the two situations as very similar.
What abstraction levels do you expect will remain only in the Human domain?
The progression from basic arithmetic, to complex ratios and basic algebra, graphing, geometry, trig, calculus, linear algebra, differential equations… all along the way, there are calculators that can help students (wolfram alpha basically). When they get to theory, proofs, etc… historically, thats where the calculator ended, but now there’s LLMs… it feels like the levels of abstractions without a “calculator” are running out.
The compiler was the “calculator” abstraction of programming, and it seems like the high-level languages now have LLMs to convert NLP to code as a sort of compiler. Especially with the explicitly stated goal of LLM companies to create the “software singularity”, I’d be interested to hear the rationale for abstractions in CS which will remain off limits to LLMs.
The "liberal" in "liberal democracy" has nothing to do with the current common meaning of "liberal" - ie, left-wing - in the USA, as it comes from classical liberalism. In short, liberal democracy means a democracy based on rule of law, separation of powers, election of representatives, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
In theory I agree with you, in practice I do not. This is one of those terms where the precise meaning is being, or has already been, lost. For instance in the overwhelming majority of rhetoric around the lines of this article, populism is framed as being in an adversarial relationship with liberal democracy. Yet that is, from a precise interpretation of 'liberal democracy', quite nonsensical.
The entire system of democracy, of any flavor, is fundamentally populist. But populism trends towards values that are not what one would consider left-wing by US standards. And so far as I can tell, that is the only real basis for the claim of its supposed adversarial relationship with liberal democracy. It is framing "liberal" as being left-wing and US-centric left wing, and not simply of liberty.
While "liberal democracy" has a very clear meaning, "populism" has very different definitions. I'm pretty sure that the definition you have in mind is pretty different from the ones I know, if you say that democracy "is fundamentally populist".
How would you define it? Or would you disagree that democracy, in its nominal form, is a political system where political action is driven by the will of the masses?
In a liberal democracy the "will of the masses" is applied indirectly, through the election of representatives, making laws, and then applying those laws and governing in accordance to those laws. To get elected, politicians and aspiring politicians tell electors all sorts of things. Some of them tell electors that their problems have simple solutions, which go against what the intellectual elites (scientists, doctors, engineers, lawyers etc.) recommend or say is doable. Those are what are usually defined populists. Some of them actually believe that "experts" lie for some agenda. Most of them know perfectly well that those simple solutions won't work, but say what they think electors want to hear. Not all politicians/parties act like that, even if it's common to have some populists in all most parties - because populism works.
It's unclear to me how the definition you're using isn't biased to the point of meaninglessness. Let me use an example. Politicians know full well we stand no chance of meaningfully impacting climate change for a practical reason - most emissions are coming from relatively adversarial countries.
If we try to encourage them to reduce emissions via some form of ongoing compensation then we asking them to impair their development in exchange for accepting putting themselves into an exploitable dependency relationship with us. They will simply never accept this, so at best it will be superficial gestures that have no real chance of having a meaningful impact.
So is the rhetoric around climate change, and politicians/parties running on claims of being able to impact it, populist, in your usage? I'd imagine not. But is there a 'clean' way to explain how this is excluded while maintaining any degree of meaningfulness of the term as you are using it?
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As for 'my' usage, I view populism as appealing to the genuine views of the masses, mostly in contrast to efforts to suppress or reshape them. It can certainly include demagoguery (which is largely what you're describing, but with a peculiar sort of bias built in), but it can also simply include leaders whose worldviews, or at least the worldview they espouse, happening to align largely with that of 'the masses.'
There is no such thing as "genuine views of the masses" which aren't shaped by anybody. "The masses" are made of people, all of which shape each other both at a micro and at a macro level, but the latter is disproportionately affected by mass communication - and, today, by digital social networks and their algorithms. Everybody has people who they look to for reference (ie, leaders) and that they trust on things which they don't know personally very well. Some leaders truly believe that you can eat your cake and have it too, and they tell their followers "trust me, and you'll have your cake and eat it too" - but usually these don't last long, because they're simply too stupid and/or ignorant. And this isn't an exclusive of the right or of the left: you have people who don't believe that carbon dioxide has a greenhouse effect, but you also have people who believe we can simply install solar panels and magically solve the mismatch between energy needs (temporal and geographical) and Sun irradiation.
Some other leaders know perfectly well that you can't eat your cake and have it too, and that in reality you need to make compromises between various things you would like to have - but they tell their followers the opposite, because they only care about reaching and then maintaining power. These are the demagogues, but they ally with the people from above and, together, form populist movements.
Then there are leaders who try to find the best compromise between the various things that "the masses" want/care about, and what reality allows to the best of our knowledge. Those are the non-populist, and they exist.
Well that's a rather political answer in that you're saying a lot, but avoiding the question, unless I'm expected to read into what you're saying, which can be interpreted in either way. I won't push it beyond to emphasize that I'm not picking particularly fringe arguments, as per your examples, I'm picking completely mainstream and normal rhetoric that you would hear from effectively 100% of politicians of a certain leaning.
As for 'genuine views' - contemporary politics is full of endless issues that if each person, absent any awareness of where we ended up, were to rank the importance - would end up nowhere remotely near the top. An obvious example is transsexual stuff. It's also comparably full of gaslighting on issues that may benefit the country, but hurt the people. For instance low skill immigration reduces wages of low-skill workers, while simultaneously 'growing the economy.' This is something which has been studied and confirmed endlessly, yet politicians and the media will do things like misrepresent studies or cite localized studies from 46 years ago to try to implicitly, sometimes explicitly, argue that it increases wages. It's complete gaslighting.
I view populism as stepping away from these sort of deceptions. Many if not most great presidents of the US in the past would certainly be derogatively framed as a populist now a days. JFK telling people we can go to the Moon if we truly focus on it, that America's resources can be spent better than trying to meddle in every single country around the world, and that a great country can only stay great if both the country works for the people but the people also work for the country? That certainly seems to fit the typical usage of the term now a days.
I considered that question just an example. Anyway, considering that China alone installed about 60% of the new renewable capacity in the whole world in 2024–2025, and that about 90% of new capacity is based on renewables both there and in India, I really don't see how your argument on that holds.
For low skill immigration, I fundamentally agree with you, and that's something I personally criticize left wing politicians a lot. I see the stance that Western countries can (and should) accept any amount of immigration as a left-wing form of populism.
Regarding JFK and the Moon, that's the opposite of populism - that's leading and shaping people's ideas and perceptions. How many Americans were thinking about going to the Moon before JFK made that an important issue?
It was indeed just an example, but a pointed one to try to figure out where your definition begins and where it ends. As for China's claims, beware of capacity factor. [1] Installed capacity is based on peak figures, whereas practical output tends to be a fraction of that for clean energy sources, but significantly higher for energy like coal. It makes it easy to make headlines that sound good, but don't mean what we'd think they mean, and China's not the only one doing this. In any case, CO2 levels are going to continue skyrocketing for the foreseeable future.
As for JFK - going to the Moon is something that people would somewhat naturally support. If they oppose it, it's going to be on political grounds, perhaps they think the money could be better spent in the current moment, and not because they literally just don't ever want to send people to the Moon. By contrast something like e.g. political correctness is the exact opposite. People are going to naturally oppose it, unless there is a political motivation behind supporting it. I also chose that exact example because of the comment you made about populists promising the Moon - it turns out that sometimes they deliver.
Sure, we're going to emit a lot of carbon dioxide for a long time, but we're talking about planet-level changes here, and changing the trend/trajectory has HUGE impact. At least if you care about future generations (I've got a daughter and several nephews, I don't know about you). Anyway, I asked chatgpt to estimate actual averaged capacity, and for China we have that nuclear+renewables (low-carbon) added 73% of new capacity in the last two years. I bet that the figure will become even better in the next years, as batteries and other storage methods become less expensive.
Regarding the Moon, are you sure that you're not equating "populist" with "what I personally like"?
To make a counterexample, what do you think about free universal medical care? Do you think that "the masses" would "naturally" want that, or not?
PS By the way, I'm far from what you would probably define "woke". I actually think that the excesses of wokism were a decisive contributing factor to Trump's win.
The capacity factor means you're also adding less energy than it might seem. Here is a nice graph of CO2 levels [1]. There's a breakdown by country a bit lower. The trend for CO2 levels remains quite sharp. And China is not the only factor. Asia, especially India, Africa, and many other places are due for ever greater levels of development and industrialization. For instance India has 1.4 billion people yet just 60% of the emissions of Europe. The entirety of Africa has less than 33% the emissions of Europe! These figures are not sustainable.
However, I am not that concerned about it, also as a family man. There's a finite amount of fossil fuels in the world, they will run out eventually, and become economically unfeasible long before that. So even if we do absolutely nothing, the world will likely be economically forced to start transitioning away, likely on a timeframe that is within our lives. Arguably it's already happening with places in the Mideast aggressively seeking to diversify their economies. In any case CO2 levels when dinos roamed the Earth and the oceans were full of life, were upwards of 1200ppm owing to natural processes. We're not going to hit anywhere near that even if we burn everything - in other words there's no scenario where we become Venus, or anything even remotely like it. Some places will become more hospitable, some will become less, optimal places for growing crops (and/or different types of crops) will shift, and overall there will be a lot more greenery. It's a pretty dumb experiment, but it'll be fine.
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On free healthcare - if we are speaking hypothetically of genuinely free health care at comparable quality then obviously everybody's going to want it. The problem is that those 'political objections' are pretty tough in this case. Obviously it won't be free - it'd be paid through taxes, and the government has already shown itself in a relationship with the healthcare industry where they are, at the minimum, uninterested in reigning in healthcare costs, and government operated systems invariably balloon costs.
Outside of free likely becoming quite expensive, there's also the issue of quality and availability. Countries that have had experience running 'free' healthcare systems for decades are increasingly running into problems in modern times with declining economic growth, declining fertility, increasing health issues (obesity, psychological, etc), and so on. Even Scandiland is seeing increasing trends towards privatization in healthcare, and that's with a vastly more appropriate population for such - much less corruption, healthier, preexisting high taxes, fewer social divisions, fewer people seeking to abuse the systems in place, etc. It is still working for them, but I'm not sure if it's indefinitely sustainable at current fertility/economic trends.
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And yeah, I definitely knew you weren't "woke" since they in general seem completely incapable of having a good old debate/discussion! I think the fear of 'wrongthink' makes people accept things that they wouldn't otherwise rationally accept which makes them unable to competently defend their views when speaking somebody of a different worldview.
Just two quick answers before we agree to disagree :)
* Life on Earth will survive any human-made change, even a full nuclear war. It's our society which won't survive if changes are too quick.
* Publicly ran healthcare systems in Europe and elsewhere are MUCH more cost efficient than the US private system, it's very easy to compare cost/performance, so the "government operated systems invariably balloon costs" is just false in this case. This isn't to say that private enterprises aren't more efficient in most cases, and the issue with private healthcare isn't that they're not efficient in terms of resources used - it’s just that maximizing profits and shareholder value when people’s lives are on the line means that you, as a health care customer, will be gouged for every penny they can get.
Brevity is a skill. Like Mark Twain wrote - I apologize for such a lengthy letter, I hadn't the time to write a short one!
In general I agree with you on both fronts - our disagreement is mostly going to be in the details and forecasts. For instance the impacts of climate change are already happening. Sea levels in parts of Florida have already risen more than 8 inches since the 50s. Yet beach front property is still selling for a premium. The point is that I expect it's going to be gradual enough that society will have time to adapt, even if the change over an extended period of time may be quite significant.
And I also completely agree that the healthcare systems pretty much anywhere in the world, government or privately operated, are dramatically more efficient than the US private system. But I don't think you can expect that to change if the government starts operating it. Medicaid's savings requires studies to measure since it's nominally more expensive/person than private healthcare. What savings there are, after a bunch of adjustments and assumptions, seem mostly explained by paying healthcare providers less per service, which is why a sizable chunk of places don't accept it. It doesn't really scream 'yeah, let's make this global and mandated' to me.
That said, I had a Norwegian friend visiting me over here in the other side of the world. He ended up getting an ear infection and went to the most premium local hospital to get it sorted out. Final charge to him = $0, even internationally. Enough to make anybody absolutely jealous, but I'm going to have a hard time believing America might be able to land on this Moon. Cheap and efficient just isn't the American way.
Was it lobbies, or costs which aren't competitive with China?
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