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In all fairness no other nation has tried Athens style pure democracy since.
Representative democracy is what they've chosen.
The reason ours feels so remote is because we allowed too many to meddle, like when SCOTUS gutted voting rights and enshrined corporate power as a person speaking.
No, not PEOPLE speaking, a single person speaking...like when we allowed smaller and smaller concentrations of wealthy interests to buy up more and more and more of the vast landscape of news and journalism, controlling larger and larger swaths of resources and consolidating them under even more ownership concentration.
We did away with the guardrails, telling ourselves it was better for us.
Hmmmm, better for us, or better for the owners?

That does not make representative democracy a bad thing, it makes weakened and corrupted versions of representative democracy a less good thing, which can turn into a bad thing however to allow it to get replaced by theocratic fascist dictatorship is a much worse thing indeed, as we may very well find out soon....if we don't value democracy.

I never said it was a bad thing. I live here and love it. I vote for the Blue King every time! I am literally retired in Florida living the good life, suckling at a soft gubmint teat and enjoying the fruits of a real estate market gone wild. The American Dream™ has come true for me.

I don't live here in fear that somehow republicans(or democrats) are going to take it all away from me if one or the other of them wins the next election or the next...we may in fact be facing a variety of existential crises and that may in fact be one of them...

But it's only one of many possible futures and not a terribly likely one. If I worried about or celebrated all the possible bad things or good things that might or might not happen in the future I'd be too exhausted to get out of bed!

Many tribes, communities, villages, and towns have operated as "pure Athenian style" democracies. It works and it works well. But it has a size and complication limit. I think our style and form of government need a serious overhaul. I don't think I'll live to see it but think it will come about. Just as I believe that social democracy will come about as an economic necessity and the obvious answer to most of the problems we face today and all of the problems we will face in the future(of a socioeconomic nature).

Anyone who can use their power to punish individual private citizens as enemies of the state can and will do just that.
You're really just saying, in so many words, that just because it hasn't happened to you yet, you don't believe it can or will.
It has happened in the past.
And it just happened this morning when SCOTUS did it to an entire territory, Puerto Rico, in an EIGHT-TO-ONE decision, no less.

They did have federal benefits, until suddenly...they didn't.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts. -Madame de Stael, writer (22 Apr 1766-1817)

I've weighed the chances carefully and decided the risk of that is vanishingly small. Many things have happened in the past. That doesn't mean they're all gonna happen tomorrow or that I need waste a lot of time worrying about it.

I consider "worrying" to be a monumental waste of time. Especially about things I have zero control over.

A lot of Republicans are scared to death that Democrats are gonna turn America into some kind of non-democratic socialist hellscape.

A lot of Democrats are scared to death that Republicans are gonna turn America into some kind of non-democratic fascist hellscape.

I don't buy into either narrative. But Republicans are actually right, they have everything to fear.

I noticed with the old server that I couldn’t like a post unless I belonged to facebook. I don’t do facebook, twitter or any other of those things. With the new server I was hoping things would be different. It isn’t. In case anyone is wondering why I never like a post or whatever, it’s because I refuse to become a facebook member. Not that I didn’t agree with you and thought your post worthy of a like.

I have a "Like" button on my screen that doesn't require any other service, right next to the "Reply" and "Quote" buttons. Clicking on that takes me to a confirmation page, still without needing FB or Twitter.

Great, it works. Thank you much.

A lot of things about the old website didn't work very well. The old "like" button would have been linked to the ReaderRant Facebook page if there had ever been one of them.

Somebody probably thought it was a like button for individual posts and added it to the webpage at some point.

That Supreme Court decision may be the final push toward Puerto Rico statehood. They may have resisted statehood because they got federal benefits without a lot of taxes. But they ARE legal US citizens, and they can move to the mainland and have full rights and benefits. Now there is no advantage at all to remaining a territory. That would mean two more Senators and three more Representatives, all of whom are likely to be Democrats. Republicans should be more careful what they wish for.