14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal

Hard-earned freedoms are wasted on societies who don't have memories of what it took to earn them. Freedom is a ratchet: slides easily and frictionlessly one way, and offers immense resistance in the other.

This is all so disheartening.

I’m not aware of a single nation where the ratchet is loosening. It appears freedom is being eroded everywhere. The most disheartening thing is that nothing works to stop it. There are countries where millions of people have protested, but in time the protests always fizzle or are stamped out, and things continue on the same trajectory.

> US has definitely loosened some of the free speech restrictions

Press, academic and political speech freedoms are at a generational low point in America.

The President has never before had the power to directly police academic speech and the media’s coverage of him. MAGA voters have no idea the power they’ve given the Presidency, which could be used in the future by a Democrat President to literally just cut funding and pull licenses for people who say stuff the left doesn’t like. (On the other hand, we can put the J6’ers in a foreign prison for a few months, mothball the antivax movement and maybe dismantle the coal plants.)