This also is exactly democracy was mostly felt to be an unsustainable system by the ancient philosophers. And in reading Plato's assessment of democracy, and its cycles, in "The Republic", he sounds like much more like a prophet than a philosopher.
Of course broadcasting your deranged random thoughts to the whole world in the middle of the night wasn’t really and option and listening to Nixon’s tapes the way they behaved in private was well.. quite something. I don’t even believe that Nixon was especially egregious either he just decided to record everything anyone said in his office due to whatever reasons.
And then you had career politicians like Johnson who might have been even more vulgar than Trump..
I, sadly, am not and he was a horror show.
> but the standards seem to have been much higher back in those days.
He was a service-cutting, union-busting, lunatic military hawk guided by Nancy's astrologer. Sure, he's not as overtly and in-your-face as bad as Trump (who could be?) but that doesn't preclude him being a horror show in and of himself.
Personally, I think the easiest theory is simply economic prosperity. Most American problems these days can be described in terms of relationship to wealth. changes in education take decades to reflect in aggregate effectiveness. If nothing changes, I think we'll be facing a similarly-violent time period for likely the rest of our lives, even if we aren't there yet.
This was obviously about a man's insecurity leveraging the courts to destroy a publicly-valuable business beyond any reasonable conception of justice. Somehow the new york times was never held to the same standard when they published blatant lies and enabled the invasion of iraq and a million murdered.
“Valuable” is doing a lot of work here. This is a tabloid you’re talking about. This is not an institution like NYT or WaPo.
Centrist idiots blathering about institutional integrity and decorum destroyed this country. I refuse to let them gain power again. I far prefer gossip rags to imperial stooges: at least they're honest about their dishonesty. They also never stooped to the level of the new york times endorsing an obviously illegal invasion.
Granted, both are equally willing to cater towards the american demand for blood rather than justice. But at least I can blame the poeple actually at the capitol for january sixth. Who the hell can I blame for the mass-complacency and dogmatism of college-educated liberals aside from the very same ignorant mass? Until a better scapegoat arrives, the editorial boards of ivy-league-catering newspapers will have to do.
Why do people not read manufacturing consent? It's the only text american adults should be reading. Everything else doesn't matter.
I’m what TwoPhonesOneKid calls a ‘centrist idiot’ in their peer comment (hey, look, I’m treating them with decorum!), and I don’t think it was more valuable than the NYT, but Gawker Media was a blog staple with a wide reach, and those blogs did real journalism in a wide range of fields in addition to click bait. Some of them arguably recovered under new ownership, but many did not.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker_Media, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker
> “Can you imagine a situation where a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy?” asked the lawyer, Douglas E. Mirell.
> “If they were a child,” Mr. Daulerio replied.
> “Under what age?” the lawyer pressed.
> “Four.”
https://archive.is/2016.03.10-033848/http://www.nytimes.com/...