I'm pleased (and grateful) that you are still writing - even if (for understandable reasons) no longer daily. Although it's hard to offer a rational or reasonable analysis of the irrational and unreasonable, your blog has come the closest to doing so of anything I've read. Which offers a certain intellectual solace - even if the conclusions of that analysis are somewhat dispiriting to say the least. But agreement on the possibility of the worst is a sort of comradeship.
I feel called on by your comment about quantitative measures of democracy. I created the website www.threatindex.org. Our current score for democratic decline in the U.S. is "54." It is an admittedly arbitrary number, but its fluctuations and rate of change mean something. I am curious what you and those who read these comments might think of the project.
I am intrigued by your idea that we can know what is imaginable but impossible. My first reaction is that there needs to be a time component to that formulation. All of the things mentioned by you and ChatGPT are impossible now, but they may not be in another year. Perhaps I misunderstand you, since your daily diary entries suggested to me that you believe that the end of elections in the United States was previously unimaginable but is now a possibility.
-sean
p.s. As an attorney with something of a constitutional law focus, I also felt called on by your previous comment that attorneys seem unable to imagine what happens after a constitutional crisis, but let that go :)
I'm pleased (and grateful) that you are still writing - even if (for understandable reasons) no longer daily. Although it's hard to offer a rational or reasonable analysis of the irrational and unreasonable, your blog has come the closest to doing so of anything I've read. Which offers a certain intellectual solace - even if the conclusions of that analysis are somewhat dispiriting to say the least. But agreement on the possibility of the worst is a sort of comradeship.
I feel called on by your comment about quantitative measures of democracy. I created the website www.threatindex.org. Our current score for democratic decline in the U.S. is "54." It is an admittedly arbitrary number, but its fluctuations and rate of change mean something. I am curious what you and those who read these comments might think of the project.
I am intrigued by your idea that we can know what is imaginable but impossible. My first reaction is that there needs to be a time component to that formulation. All of the things mentioned by you and ChatGPT are impossible now, but they may not be in another year. Perhaps I misunderstand you, since your daily diary entries suggested to me that you believe that the end of elections in the United States was previously unimaginable but is now a possibility.
-sean
p.s. As an attorney with something of a constitutional law focus, I also felt called on by your previous comment that attorneys seem unable to imagine what happens after a constitutional crisis, but let that go :)
I believe you meant Andrew Cuomo, not his father Mario. Both were past governors of Massachusetts.
Old age!