{"id":1209,"date":"2009-11-18T00:42:11","date_gmt":"2009-11-18T00:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1209"},"modified":"2009-11-18T00:42:11","modified_gmt":"2009-11-18T00:42:11","slug":"twenty-years-of-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1209","title":{"rendered":"Twenty years of democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Radio Free Europe (yes, they still exist) have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rferl.org\/content\/European_Intellectuals_Warn_Of_Democracy_Crisis_20_Years_After_Berlin_Walls_Fall\/1878366.html\">an article<\/a> on their Web site, about the threat to democracy represented by public cynicism and corruption. While I don&#8217;t expect democracy to collapse in Eastern Europe just yet, I can&#8217;t disagree with their concern. Curiously, a reader comment on the same Web site by a &#8220;Sergey&#8221; from New York (originally from Ukraine) provides, perhaps unwittingly, a perfect demonstration of the first point: Sergey writes that &#8220;there is no &#8216;democracy, market economy, and civil society&#8217;, not in EU, not in US&#8221;, calling democracy &#8220;just another utopia&#8221;, and questioning the wisdom of &#8220;supporting corrupt and malfunctioning &#8216;democracies&#8217; in Ukraine and Georgia&#8221; (do I detect more than a tinge of Russian nationalism here?).<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1209' send='true' layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Radio Free Europe (yes, they still exist) have an article on their Web site, about the threat to democracy represented by public cynicism and corruption. While I don&#8217;t expect democracy to collapse in Eastern Europe just yet, I can&#8217;t disagree with their concern. Curiously, a reader comment on the same Web site by a &#8220;Sergey&#8221; <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1209' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1210,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions\/1210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}