Great article. Glad to see Farhad back. I was missing his writing. I was a little unclear whether the statistics cited at the top about declining newspaper readership are “platform-agnostic.”

I’m 38, so I don’t fall into the youth demographic, but I’ve been reading newspapers since I was 10 years old. I still do peruse a newspaper almost daily, but from the Web. The way I value journalism is that its relationship to power should be characterized by skepticism. Which is what brings me back to Salon just about every day,

And given what’s happened at the NYT, my values will keep me away from that paper forever. I subscribed for awhile to the Wall Street Journal because its news coverage doesn’t seen to suffer from the insecurity of historically “liberal” newspapers whose publishers and editors seem driven now to undermine their commitment to journalistic values to prove their “balance.” Paradoxically, you can get better truth out of the Wall Street Journal because it doesn’t have anything to prove (though its political coverage is deeply suspect). So dump your NYT subscription and go for the WSJ if you want a better approximation of the truth.

Another interesting point to my mind is how the web can detach us from the geography of a newspaper, yet we can stay readers. Though I now live in Massachusetts, the newspaper I skim on the Web is the SF Chronicle (mostly for columnists like Mark Morford who has a voice like no other). Unfortunately, since the death of newspaper competition in San Francisco, the quality of the Chron’s “news product” has tanked.

I think that in a newsworld milieu of largely undifferentiated crap what will determine which news source comes down to small details, like the columnists, the food section, or what topics do or don’t get covered. The Boston Globe seems like an OK newspaper, but education is a huge beat here and I just don’t give a damn about what’s happening at Harvard, Brandeis, Northeastern or MIT. My mother subscribed to the Chronicle for over 50 years. She saw the drop in quality of the paper, yet continued subscribing until she discovered that the Contra Costa Times had a better food section. Bye bye, Chronicle.

Wasn't Hitler also an impressive war vet with combat experience? Many European WWI vets returned from the trenches feeling entitled to rule the countries for which they had fought and bled. Their political participation didn’t necesarily result in better-run democracies. In some places it lead to fascism and WWII.

I don’t want to detract anything from all those Democratic candidates for public office that are running for the ’06 elections who are recently back from Iraq. I think their hearts, values and ideals are in the right place (some of whom I will be donating money to). And the other side of the coin is someone like Eisenhower, a military man with combat experience who was also a great democratic leader.

But I am very uncomfortable with the idea that someone’s citizenship is somehow less meaningful because they didn’t serve in the military. I'd like to say that militarism is un-American, but I'm not sure that that is true anymore.

By contrast, I'm sure the Republicans would not hesitate to embrace war vets willing to play their games, transforming them into an unreproachable class of special citizens entitled to lord it over the rest of us.

I’m intrigued by the political and social policy ramifications of Dr. Hayes theories.

What is the value of pain and suffering to the community and society if such experiences better the individual? Or as Dr. Hayes puts it, “If you're not willing to have the pain, you're not going to get the living. (assuming that living in the sense Hayes uses it is roughly analogous to bettering the individual)”

And why should we as a matter of public policy provide better schools, housing assistance, state-subsidized child care, or most other manifestations of a social safety net when in fact we may be depriving people of valuable growing experiences that will make better men and women of them? If it is revealed that deprivation and adversity build character and provide meaning to life, then what would a set of political ideas look like that reflected this revelation?

I’ve often wondered where are modern fundamentalist Christians coming from when they align themselves with rightwing ideology that seems so hostile to the mercy of the sermon on the mount and the hundreds of statements Jesus made about helping the poor.

I found another tradition of Christian thinking in a book of spiritual proverbs from the 1800s: Affliction is the school of faith; Affliction scours the rust from faith; Afflictions are flails to thresh off our husks; Fiery trials make golden Christians.

And do policymakers who subscribe to such a belief system become more cavalier about disaster preparedness or less repulsed by the ravages of war—with terrible consequences for the rest of us?

I can get this attitude from hundreds of other places in the media. It's as prevalent as air. I come to Salon for something different. Maybe you'll get a special mention on Rush Limbaugh's show today...