I can imagine. You people quietly let a mafia boss own your nation, and let him bankrupt your future by throwing endless battalions of young men into the maw of war in Ukraine, without even token protest. So, yes, I can well imagine that you find this "hilarious."
As a US citizen resident of Finland who has been so far relatively neutral-to-moderately supportive of MAGA wrt the culture wars, I find Trump's posturing on Greenland appalling and disgraceful. Yes, we all know that Trump's MO is to demand something horrendous in order to secure something less horrendous, but there is no path from threatening an ally's sovereignty that leads to anything good for the US. Monstrous.
This isn’t an aberration, it’s a continuation. Trump has repeatedly done things that would have been disqualifying for any normal president: threatening allies, undermining institutions, abusing power, normalizing coercion. The reason this moment feels different to some people isn’t that the behavior changed, it’s that they’re finally among those bearing the downside. That normalization, enabled by years of “it doesn’t affect me” neutrality, is part of how we got here.
That's only part of it. It feels worse now because everything is visible. Information moves instantly. Evidence is public. Financial trails can be followed. Citizens now expect ethical behavior as a baseline rather than a bonus. In earlier eras, people slept better largely because they didn’t know what was happening, not because leaders were more virtuous.
For decades, elite self-dealing, institutional opacity, and captured power steadily eroded public trust. Trump did not arrive as a reformer. He arrived as a punishment mechanism. A stress test.
With respect, that is naive. To demonstrate, create a new account and go ahead and make that change. It will be reverted. Wikipedia is not the democratic free-for-all it once was.
If you do perform that experiment and I am wrong, please come back and let us know.
Wikipedia is and has always been a wiki; reverting bad or controversial edits has always been expected from day one.
Also Wikipedia has developed an editorial line of its own, so it's normal that edits that go against the line will be put in question; if that happens to you, you're expected to collaborate in the talk pages to express your intent for the changes, and possibly get recommendations on how to tweak it so that it sticks.
It also happens that most of contributions by first timers are indistinguishable from vandalism or spam; those are so obvious that an automated bot is able to recognize them and revert them without human supervision, with a very high success rate.
However if those first contributions are genuinely useful to the encyclopedia, such as adding high quality references for an unverified claim, correcting typos, or removing obvious vandalism that slipped through the cracks, it's much more likely that the edits will stay; go ahead and try that experiment and tell us how it went.
> reverting bad or controversial edits has always been expected from day one.
How charming of you to think that the well-meaning contributor is going to happily smile and agree with you when you tell them that their well-meaning contributions are bad.
In my experience this kind of thing works only with the discipline and will to actually get to it, and that really depends on the project, team and management dynamic.
I've been receiving a "stale issue, closing soon" notification on an open source project every two months for over a year, which I dutifully bump and the issue continues to be studiously ignored. Much respect to that team, but the techno-fix of quarterly reminders are not addressing the core issue of missing will, process or personnel. It's a bit like setting a clock ahead in order to leave on time: the will to be on time is the driver, not the clock.
However, for those teams with the will and process to address old TODOs, seems like a nice reminder. I might use it!
On the contrary, I think we are entering a new golden age of local journalism in the US, but it does not look like the old one, so we do not recognize it yet.
What is collapsing is the legacy institutional model. What is emerging is a procedural one: individuals showing up locally, documenting power directly, publishing primary evidence, and forcing accountability through visibility rather than prestige.
Projects like Honor Your Oath, Long Island Audit, Guerilla Media, and even single-person operations with a camera and FOIA literacy are doing real journalism. They attend meetings, record encounters, publish receipts, and focus on consequences that are immediate and specific.
The cost of presence is now low. The cost of obscurity for local officials is higher. Credibility increasingly comes from raw evidence rather than narrative authority. These outlets are not trying to inform everyone. They are informing the people affected directly.
It feels messy, personal, and sometimes abrasive because it is not professionalized in the old sense. Historically, that is what journalism looked like before it was institutionalized.
For example, Jeff Gray quietly stands in public with a “God Bless Homeless Vets” sign. People often assume he is homeless and attempt to violate his rights, frequently including police officers. The resulting interactions, all on camera, expose how poorly basic constitutional rights are understood or respected at the local level. https://youtu.be/-um41lMH3c4
Ronald Durbin of Guerilla Media is a muckraker in the classic sense, repeatedly confronting local power structures in person. He recently had a gun drawn on him at a town council meeting. https://youtube.com/@guerrillapublishing
Sean Reyes from Long Island Audit has been arrested multiple times for filming inside police station lobbies despite clear New York law allowing it, and has been physically attacked and had firearms brandished at him while attempting interviews, all documented on video. https://youtube.com/@longislandaudit
There are so many others. This is what local journalism looks like now.
...my sister once came home from school saying: “The nuns mentioned someone called Sigmund Freud and said I should know who he is.”
“Ah,” said my father in a serious tone (his only tone) . “That’s awkward. He was my grandfather; he invented the flush toilet. If anyone mentions his name again, change the subject.” My sister believed this for years.
I have a pet theory that everybody gets one lifetime, and no matter how long that life is, it always subjectively feels like one lifetime. Whether you live three days or a hundred years, it will always feel about the same amount of time, both interminable and too short.
That reminds me in turn of a joke we used to have, that the afterlife is being on a subway car with constant, unclear, but important announcements. Maybe this stop is heaven, maybe hell, maybe nirvana, maybe oblivion. There's no way to tell. Getting off at the wrong stop would be catastrophic. So, you remain, forever, riding in this afterlife subway car.
I really enjoyed my roast review. I loved the feedback that I'm only 5% helpful and 35% contrarian! I will endeavor to boost that helpfulness percentage next year.
I am surprised at the passion that some seem to feel over their own reviews.
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