“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” -Haruki Murakami Nearly every government, from tiny Tuvalu, all the way up to India, has a public sphere. That is, a community of some kind, “made up of private people gathered together as a public…
I’ve already talked about why democracy works, and its flaws, but I’ve hardly addressed the potential to improve democracy further. In this article I’ll be doing just that! Citizen Journalism: As I talked about in the previous article, the press is extremely important in upholding democracy. While the internet’s contributions to this are often overlooked…
In light of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, some of you might be wondering what you can do to help Ukraine in this vital moment. It’s easy to feel helpless when this conflict is happening so far away, but you can help. Here are some ways to do just that: -Donate: You can do what our…
How would you describe yourself to someone who’s never heard of you before? I make videos on Youtube about urban planning and politics from a left perspective, and also dunk on Elon Musk a lot. Lately people started calling me the “Giga Chad of Urban Planning”, a moniker I can’t help but accept. Why did…
As objectively great as democracy is, it does have serious flaws. In this article I’ll be looking at some of the biggest flaws in democracy and how to address, or at least reduce, them. Short-termism: One of the biggest criticisms of democracy is that it encourages short-term thinking. With politicians serving short terms and having…
Sometimes it seems that faith in democracy is waning in the West. As countries like China appear to speed ahead, there appears to be an increasing tendency in the West to attribute its own perceived failures to the most obvious difference between it and its rivals: democracy. In this series of articles I’ll talk about…
While the G7 summit this year was disappointing to some, mainly due to unambitious contributions to the climate fight and vaccine donations, one interesting thing they did manage to get through was “Build Back Better World” (B3W). It is intended to be an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which has been one…
The Nord Stream 2 project is an under-construction gas pipeline that would go from Russia to Germany which has been the subject of a lot of controversy recently. So let’s look a bit deeper into it. Nord Stream 2 is an expansion of the original Nord Stream gas line, creating two additional pipelines along the…
Today the EU and Japan signed the “EU-Japan Green Alliance” during the 27th EU-Japan summit, which also occurred today. So what’s happened? Firstly, European Council President, Charles Michel and European Commision President, Ursula Von der Leyen represented the EU at this summit while Japan was represented by their PM Yoshihide Suga. What did they discuss…