Fascinating I live in a country were nobody has been thinking about Christianity since the 1960s. It's like Americans speak an entirely different language.
>A democracy is only as effective as its people are educated
I missed that part of the Western Constitutions. It is likely missing because it is a false and self-serving axiom, as well as flirting with being the opposite of democracy. Mostly, it is totalitarian regimes that invoke education as being necessary for their citizens.
Is it only democracy and not a downward spiral when democracy moves in the direction that you prefer?
You might have to accept that democracy works, and that if nothing else democracy is the individual freedom to decide on what is true.
The second that you start restricting that freedom of information and individual decisions pertaining to it, impacting elections for example, you can no longer appeal to democracy.
Personally I think that more subjects are deceptive than either they or you likely know. But I'm not so debased as to call for restrictions on your information. You're free to believe in and seek out your deceptions, as a matter of democracy.
You are somehow confusing education with indoctrination.
The goal of education is to give people (ideally at a young age) valuable knowledge, critical thinking skills, and the ability to question and make independent judgments. There's nothing anti-democratic about that. Quite the opposite. And all evidence suggests this is far more common in democracies than it is in totalitarian regimes.
The goal of indoctrination is to instill a fixed set of beliefs or loyalties and to discourage doubt or alternative perspectives. Totalitarian regimes do this to create obedience and ideological conformity. And although many competing parties in democratic countries would like to do the same for their cause, that doesn't make it the definition of education.
Reads like the very news feeds have been giving people mental health issues for decades and decades.
Perhaps fewer and fewer people believe let alone like to have your patter as their internal monologue.
Which amounts to an agreement to have your extremist / alarmist voice forever in their heads lest climate change leads to the H word. I think that I have that about right, if your post is to be believed.
Of course people with babies didn't riot, and of course rubber bullets can't be fired near them. What are you suggesting?? There's some truly "weird" stuff on HN as of late.
Moving on.
Perhaps they didn't riot.
Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.
Sometimes the riot happens after the teargas and rubber bullets. Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property. And sometimes riots happen because people are assholes and nobody is going to stop them.
The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.
>Sometimes the riot happens after the teargas and rubber bullets.
Gaslighter
>Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property.
A psychopath's excuse to harm innocent people.
People who want to destroy property will always claim that their "humanity isn't being respected". Psychopaths commonly play the victim to justify harming people who have nothing to do with them.
>The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.
The comment under discussion was the one psychopathically lamenting that well-off peaceful protestors "with babies" weren't met with force. In contrast, no one thinks that the recent LA riots were peaceful.
>"which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."
What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment.
Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed.
I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.
Neither the City of LA nor any city in the world has a municipal water supply equipped to combat an urban wildfire. Embers were blown miles ahead of the fire front onto new rooftops.
Using guidelines from the National Fire Academy to suppress housefires, they would've needed to simultaneously deploy 10 or 12 thousand industrial-zone (not residential-zone) fire hydrants. Not only do those not exist, but there would've been no way to pressurize them simultaneously.
At only hour 4 of the fire (1200 acres, assume 5% are structures), they already would've had to deploy 1800 industrial-zone fire hydrants to suppress it. Again using NFA's flow rate guidelines. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, had it been full, would've been emptied in about an hour assuming it could maintain pressure (which it couldn't).
Wildfires are fundamentally fought with firebreaks and aircraft, both of which are extremely challenging in high-wind urban environments. They are contained until they burn out their fuel. They are not ever combatted with municipal water supplies.
Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?
You've got to be kidding. Have you ever even gone hiking in those hills? Much of the terrain doesn't allow for heavy equipment use. The areas where the wildfires spread fastest are so rough and steep that even doing it by manual labor is extremely challenging. The state and local governments simply don't have that many workers (or goats), or the budget to pay for the work. The scale of the problem is immense.
Interestingly hills used to be considered a horrible place to build and poor shanty towns were constructed up the hill with the nicer parts of town in the valley. People didn't want to climb up the hill every day, you had problems with access to water and supplies. The ground was prone to shifting. You also had high winds and yeah, in fire prone areas, fire goes uphill.
What changed? Automobiles, reinforced concrete, retention walls, lift pumps, subsidized road construction.. People in LA with money now want their homes perched up a hill with inaccessible terrain covered in brush below it (that ensures nobody will build on their view!).
Same with oceanside land by the way. If you go to the shore of the bay of Biscay in France, for instance, the "seaside" villages are built not on the beach, but a few hundred yards inland. Building right on a sandy storm-swept shoreline would have seemed ludicrous when those towns were being constructed.
You're not making any sense. Even with roads, the terrain above and below the roads is largely inaccessible. If you haven't personally traveled through those areas then you might not be able to visualize the difficulty.
As for fences, what a stupid and pointless idea. The wildfires spread largely by embers blown up in the air, not by flaming debris being pushed across the ground. And what exactly are you going to build the fences out of?
In the vicinity of San Francisco, in the 80s, there was a big fire in a rural area, where every house but one burned to the ground. The one was untouched. One feature it had was a low masonry wall about 20 feet away from the house. The firemen quoted in the newspaper said that wall was instrumental in keeping rolling, burning debris away from the house.
Fires aren't always accompanied by high velocity winds. Lower velocity winds will pile up the embers behind various obstacles, like a low wall.
Masonry walls also are an obstacle for the wind, which will slow down near the ground, and behind the wall it will be still, which will result in debris falling to the ground.
The wall can also be made of chicken wire. It would be appropriate to experiment with various forms of inexpensive fencing like chicken wire.
As for hills, it isn't necessary to denude them completely of vegetation. Just the parts that are easily accessed, and alongside the roads.
I seriously doubt experienced wildfire firefighters would agree with your assessment that it's completely hopeless.
These aren't done more commonly in the LA area due to intense public opposition. It turns out people don't like inhaling smoke year round. Cities in general struggle to do things their citizens don't want them to do and it's not clear to me that this is a bad thing or something you can really blame the city for.
Sure, and here's what has changed between then and now:
1. A much longer and drier dry season
2. A much larger urban-wilderness interface
3. A much more organized public apparatus to combat environmental hazards (even in cases like this which require tradeoffs against more severe future risks)
The reason this is such a challenging problem today is not because everyone living in 2025 is a moron or morally corrupt and the people in the 70s were not.
California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts (replacing thousands of years of work by indigenous people with fire suppression), and also unprecedented climate change.
Should they do more? Of course. With what resources?
I recently learned 82% of California fire fighters are unpaid volunteers. That doesn’t include the prison labor.
The entire government has its
priorities completely wrong, especially at the federal level. Blaming the city of LA makes very little sense.
Blaming environmentalists for consistently sounding the alarm over this stuff for 50+ years and then being ignored also doesn’t make sense.
One thing that does make sense: Look at the writings of the people that blocked wind and nuclear power in the 1980’s, and solar / batteries in the 1990s.
They explicitly said they knew their actions would burn the planet down, and it didn’t matter to them. Now they’ve dismantling our democracy, eliminating emergency response groups like FEMA, and retasking the national guard (California’s last line of fire defense) as an illegal police force.
Your comment is quite disconnected from reality. Blaming the city of LA makes a lot of sense. The mayor Karen Bass was completely ineffectual. And even before she was elected the city had failed to properly upgrade their fire fighting infrastructure or building codes.
Most volunteer fire fighters act as reserves in more rural areas and are only called up for major incidents. The city of LA and surrounding cities like Calabasas don't rely heavily on volunteers.
Climate change might be a minor factor in the intensity of the 2025 Southern California wildfires but those have been happening periodically for millennia. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will sometimes dump a lot of rain on Southern California for several years at a stretch causing extensive brush growth, then shift north for several years allowing everything to dry out. At that point any little spark will ignite a raging wildfire, especially when the Santa Ana winds are blowing. This is not "forest" that can be actively managed, it's chaparral in rough hilly terrain. It's simply impossible to clear much of the brush or conduct controlled burns. The only effective measures are building fire-resistant structures with defensible space around them — or simply not building in those areas at all.
> California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts
Including building in the chaparral hills in the first place. Sane policy would be to forbid new construction where fires have ravaged in the past or at least deny insurance, because it's like building in a floodplain. The problem is that the same area is suffering from systemic under-construction of housing.
Swiss banking hasn't been legally feasible for Americans since the GWB era, famously and if memory serves. I'm pretty sure that it isn't offered to Americans.
There is no for Pete’s sake. A one party state has a precise commonly accepted definition which applies everywhere. There is no other definition in the USA which would make California one.
The fact that the current Republican propaganda would make the USSR blush in how they consistently misuse terms doesn’t magically change that.
I was using the term "one-party state" metaphorically. I thought that would be obvious.
In any case the demographics in California are now such that it is close to impossible for a Republican governor to be elected.
Which means that Dem politicians are now only really accountable to the people of influence in their own party, not so much the general public.
And they have an entirely different set of interests to the general public.
It doesn't matter what your political persuasion, a "one-party state" is in nobody's interest.
For example if politics was not so dysfunctional in California you might have had a competent mayor in LA and the Palisades would still be standing....
He's been deploying the National Guard to cities in peacetime, And the National Guard helped with the Palisades response. I'm sure he could deploy them to rake the forest floor.
It actually seems strange he has not; he sounded so confident in that approach on the campaign trail.
(... ironically: to the extent those parks have a trash problem, it's because Trump's administration cut funding to the park service (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administr...), which maintains those parks directly since they are federally-owned).
Those damn far-right nazis, picking up litter in the park...it's the end of democracy ; )
Only MSNBC could put a negative spin on that....thanks for the link, I had a good laugh.
I didn't think anyone has accused our men and women in the armed services of being Nazis... At least around here. So I have no idea where that came from.
But it is interesting to observe this administration, which ostensibly is anti-waste (given the started goals of DOGE), replacing park service employees with far more expensive Marines on deployment for something as far from national defense as trash duty. Unless those scraps of candy wrapper and discarded straws are packing a lot of firepower these days...
I'm just saying, if he's going to deploy them for trash duty, why not deploy them to rake the forest floor like he said someone should do? Especially since his administration is currently pulling active firefighters off the front lines of fighting a fire because they've decided that deportation is a higher priority than protecting American property and lives (https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/31/us/washington-fire-detain-wor...).
It doesn't. It's a common turn of phrase meant to describe a State in which one party is assured to be elected in any given election.
You can't wish it away nor make an autistic proclamation of "precision" over language use and meaning. "Applies everywhere"... hilarious. Says who? Perhaps my definition "applies everywhere". What now?
In reality, how language works is that the definition of such phrases is defined by customary use. And the customary use very much includes the definition that I described.
How phrasing is widely used, in practice, is the "accepted" way that language meaning works.
I' hate to do this, but you keep arguing, Do you have a clinical Master of Science in a communication discipline? I do. I'm familiar with the underlying academic theories of language, especially as applied to communication issues. I'm right and you're wrong.
Thiel has a Girardian worldview, at least in part.
Say what you want about Thiel, but Girard is one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the modern era.