The Post-Partisan Emporium

  If US Democracy Is Dead (Not That It Ever Existed)- What Potential Forms of Dictatorship Come Next? RICHARD SOLOMON   By the time the Battle of Arginusae trials purged the best generals, and Socrates drank the hemlock, and Plato wrote his “Republic,” Athenian democracy had metastasized into a corrupt sham. A sizable number of US citizens currently view the American republic (now empire) with the same disgust that Plato viewed Athens’ failed democracy. In what would have been inconceivable ten years ago, many long for a dictator to rescue them from “democracy,” which operates as neoliberal totalitarianism coated with a veneer of identity politics. Democracy is cool until it isn’t. Apart from some isolated rainforest tribes and shipwrecked castaways that fall below Dunbar’s Number, to my knowledge, true democracy has never existed in city-states or nations. To the credit of the framers of the Athenian and US Constitutions, they installed democratic institutions that offered ci...

  Mysteriously, warming is happening across the solar system. The one common factor is at the center of it all: the sun. Because man is burning fossil fuels, our planet is allegedly becoming increasingly covered by a blanket of “heat-trapping” greenhouse gases, scientists like to make people believe. The recent global warming simply couldn’t have anything to do with the sun, they insist. They’re likely way off the mark. Today German   prof. Stefan Homburg tweeted a summary   of warming that’s happening at other places within our solar system, suggesting the sun is behind it. “Global warming isn’t only happening on earth,” he tweets. Triton has warmed 3°K For example, warming is happening on Triton, Neptune’s moon. According to Germany’s   wissenschaft.de : “Neptune’s giant moon Triton is the first body in the solar system where global warming could be detected.” According to measurements, the atmospheric pressure doubled and the temperature rose 3 degrees Kelvin. “T...

  2023 French riots have nothing to do with the pre-revolutionary ones CARLOS RAMALHETE The Eiffel Tower cannot enlighten the polar opposite of the Enlightenment "Is Paris burning?", Hitler would have asked when his troops fled the French capital. On that particular occasion, it was not; his goons had not followed his orders to set it on fire. Yet, Paris doesn't need German troops to burn. Riots are such a proud French tradition that the famous wide Parisian boulevards, one of the most admired aspects of its urban planning, were created to make it harder for rioters to block them. Most French riots are about things that in historical terms can be called small stuff. The price of bus tickets or a new unpopular law often had riotous consequences. Some riots, still, are symptoms of a deeper societal malaise. Those leading to the French Revolution are probably the most evident, of course. The student riots in May 1968, protesting the rule that forbade male students to enter f...