Francis Fukuyama mentions this in one his books -- The Origins of Political Order or Political Order and Political Decay, I can't remember which -- and argues that this is an important part of how American democracy was workable (and British democracy too, by the way).
Other thinkers with related ideas are mentioned by other commenters:
As far as I can remember, Fukuyama's idea was that small organizations gave people a way come together as members of a certain community of practice or interest -- a trade, religion, a hobby -- and to gain first hand experience with self-governance. The organizations also provided a way give the shared concerns of their members a public voice. It's not feasible for a political candidate to visit every tradesman of every stripe in his shop, but when the horseshoers have a regular meeting at their hall, a candidate can often arrange to visit the hall for an hour or two. The same is true for ladies' charitable societies, religious groups, libraries, map collectors and many other groups that represent certain interests or powers in the society. These organizations were often (though not always) chapters in larger organizations, which provided a way to really focus people's voice at higher levels of government.
I believe the absence of these social organizations is more or less the cause of the imbalance in US democracy today. It simply is not workable for the individual to face off, toe-to-toe and unmediated, with the state.
Can confirm this is happening. But the money paid is tiny. Think thousands of dollars, not millions. Not enough to keep the lights on. I would assume they do pretty well from donations.
Perhaps if there were fewer radicals this would be less of a problem. Many thousands of characters could probably be generated from a small number of radicals.
32 radicals are enough for ~75% of characters though. My biggest problem with writing is that I default to writing fairly small so if I have to do a character with more than 12-15 strokes it's either way too big or hard to read later.
For everyone in this thread hoping for a "Marshall Plan" or other functional aid regime for Gaza, keep in mind that the Marshall Plan began with defeat. It was only with Germany's unconditional surrender that the Allies could establish security and make a plan for the future. Hamas has had many opportunities to surrender and hasn't taken them.
Hitler had many opportunities, as well; but chose not to. Surrender was not a choice the Allies could make for him or for Germany; and it is not a choice Israel can make for Hamas or Gaza.
The only path for peace in the Middle East is for Israel to get the same treatment Germany got after WW2. Israel has shown over many decades that it does not respect human life. The mass murders comitted by the Tel Aviv regime leave no other option.
one could argue, that with hamas de facto defeated and now rival gangs rising up to take power, israel could unilaterally ceasefire and hold elections for a new government to run the strip. hamas, if they pop up again, are disposed of with both domestic and IDF forces.
the main problem is that doing so would probably result in the death of the hostages. hamas wants to stay in power, even if gaza is reduced to sand, they will hold onto the hostages until their power, even over nothing but skeletons, is assured.
the IDF could continue to engage on hamas's terms, or it could make the heartbreaking decision to give up on the hostages and focus on saving the innocent gazan civilians.
Israels government doesn't care about the hostages. They could have saved all remaining hostages by just not unilaterally breaking the ceasefire earlier this year.
Ultimately it's Iran's call who takes power in Gaza, as they've been funding various groups based on the willingness to engage Israel - for this reason the PLO originally fell out in favor of Hamas when it softened its stance.
After all these atrocities, even with Hamas completely gone the hatred for Israel will remain. This war will not stop, only pause.
Imagine all the kids that are growing up in Gaza now, witnessing so much pain, misery and death. How on earth could they forgive Israel, especially as it continues to invade and occupy their territories ?
These are very, very different situations. You are comparing nations and cultures that have be living side by side for thousands of years to a 77 year old state (Israel) occupying territory that has been Palestinean for thousands of years.
Israel and Ozzy Osbourne were born on the same year. People that were born after Ozzy, can no longer return to their birthplace, because it is now Israel and they are besieged in Gaza.
> You are comparing nations and cultures that have be living side by side for thousands of years to a 77 year old state (Israel) occupying territory that has been Palestinean for thousands of years.
What difference does that make for 'all the kids that are growing up in Gaza now'? If they're less than 77 years old (which I assume they are, being kids and all), Israel has been their (and many of their parents') neighbour for all of their lives.
International relationships and balances are created through centuries of cultural ties and exchanges. Don't you think it makes a difference if you know that you cannot visit the birthplace of your parents because it has been occupied ?
Any comparison between the Palestinians and Nazi Germany is absurd. It's like comparing the Native Americans to the Nazis and asking, "Why didn't they just surrender to the European colonists? They chose to fight to the end, so it's their own fault."
The Arabs did not replace the native peoples of the Levant. The Palestinians turn out to be even more closely related to ancient Levantine people (including ancient Israelites) than most Israelis are. Levantine peoples started speaking Arabic, the same way that Jews in ancient times stopped speaking Hebrew (except in religious contexts) and adopted Aramaic as their native language.
Not that any of this matters. What happened in the 7th Century CE is not relevant to the question of who the native population was in 1900.
> What happened in the 7th Century CE is not relevant to the question of who the native population was in 1900.
but it does. Jewish people have lived in the area for 3600 years, Arab Abs arrived 1600 years later, violently colonising the Middle East and North Africa Africa and violence in the name of Islam remains a global problem to this day.
Judaism hasn't even existed for anywhere near 3600 years, and most Arabs are just local people who started speaking Arabic in the centuries after the spread of Islam (much like the Jews stopped speaking Hebrew 2000 years ago and adopted Aramaic).
One of the weirdest things about this conflict is that the Palestinians are more closely related to the ancient Israelites than many (maybe even most) Israelis.
There were also people in the German Realm, aiming for negotiations (July-Assassinations, Stauffenberg), but the allies made it clear early on that they don't wanted a peace deal, which led to less support among the conspirators.
It was also the US-Marshall Plan (not the allied) and it was also for Europe not for Germany.
One reason to doubt that Israel is systematically exterminating the Gazan population is simply that the population is not decreasing or projected to decrease, which is to say, the excess deaths due to the conflict are not all that great relative to the natural rate of increase of the population.
Israel should be as aware of the statistics as anyone, especially when undertaking the systematic extermination of a population. If Israel actually intended this, don't you think it would go much faster, with the tremendous amount of ordnance that has been expended and the overwhelming military force Israel has in place? It just doesn't add up.
Who is it that you expect to be doing the counting? I've seen estimates of anywhere from 50k-500k dead, but nobody is sure because outsiders aren't being allowed to enter and the people inside have enough trouble staying alive and little time to be doing headcounts and statistics. Israel hasn't been releasing any numbers at all from what I can tell.
I do think that Israel doesn't have to be fighting this fight; instead it could be playing the soft power game in Gaza much better...
What makes you think that?
You mention the Marshall Plan, but the Marshall Plan worked in part because of Germany's unconditional surrender and the Allies complete assumption of control of Germany. If Israel wanted to follow the same game plan, they would have to do what they are doing, until Hamas was utterly defeated militarily.
It's important to recognize that Germany's surrender was not conditioned on any aid or support or anything else. Imagine if the Marshall Plan had been started prior to Germany's defeat -- it would only have prolonged the conflict.
It's a straightforward conclusion from research on the dynamics of grievance-fueled violence. Basically, unlike Nazi Germany, the strength of Hamas is proportional to how many aggrieved civilians there are. Every airstrike that kills one fighter creates two more down the road, out of the aggrieved survivors. I'm pretty sure Hamas understood this and launched the Oct 7th attack with the goal of provoking the harshest possible reaction, and Israel played right into their hands.
Their strength in armaments almost doesn't matter; even if every tunnel is collapsed and every rocket launch site obliterated, even if a ceasefire is reached and the hostages returned, even if Hamas leadership capitulates, you still end up with two million angry people swearing revenge for the injustices they've suffered.
There are two stable equilibria that this can settle into: no grievances, or no surviving civilians. I think the former is the only hope although Israel is making all the wrong moves. I am sure there are right-wing hardliners who would push for the ethnic cleansing route, but most Israelis are peace-minded moderates who would never forgive that option, and so I really think that result would eventually collapse the state of Israel from the inside out, doing more damage than any Hamas rockets ever could.
The Nazis' rise to power was fueled by German grievances, in particular, with their opponents of long-standing, the French. How is it that research on the dynamics of grievance-fueled violence would not apply to Nazi Germany and lead to the same conclusion, that there are two stable equilibria that World War Two could have settled into: no grievances, or no surviving civilians?
This is not quite the same thing, because it requires `sqlx prepare` to be run first; and that talks to the database to get type information. In SQLC, on the other hand, query parsing and type inference is implemented from first principles, in pure Go.
sqlc's approach has its limitations. Its SQLite query parser is generated from an ANTLR grammar, and I've encountered situations where valid SQLite syntax was rejected by sqlc due to their parser failing.
Type inference was okay, since SQLite barely has any types. The bigger issue I had was dealing with migration files. The nice part about SQLx is that `cargo sqlx database setup` will run all necessary migrations, and no special tooling is necessary to manage migration files. sqlc, on the other hand, hard codes support for specific Go migration tools; each of the supported tools were either too opinionated for my use case or seemed unmaintained. SQLx has built-in tooling for migrations; it requires zero extra dependencies and satisfies my needs. Additionally, inferring types inside the actual database has its benefits: (1) no situations where subsets of valid query syntax are rejected, and (2) the DB may be used for actual schema validation.
For an example of why (2) may be better than sqlc's approach: databases like SQLite sometimes allow NULL primary keys; this gets reflected in SQLx when it validates inferred types against actual database schemas. When I last used sqlc, this potential footgun was never represented in the generated types. In SQLx, this footgun is documented in the type system whenever it can detect that SQLite allows silly things (like NULL primary keys when the PK satisfies certain conditions).
reply