‘A country doesn’t become free just because a law says it should be’
Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
‘Afroman: American patriot’
Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein at The Washington Post
Rapper Afroman “demonstrated in often hilarious fashion why America’s commitment to freedom of speech is the dread of tyrants big and small,” say Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein. Police officers “raided his rural Ohio home in 2022,” and Afroman “responded the way artists have responded to being wronged since time immemorial: turning it into art.” A “country is free when the citizen mocks the state actors who harmed him and the system defends his right to do it.”
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‘Trump’s video game war: AI, memes and a simplistic narrative have flattened the conflict in Iran’
Nesrine Malik at The Guardian
The “war on Iran, even as it spreads and destabilizes the Middle East and the global economy, is not real. This is how it is being portrayed by the Trump administration,” says Nesrine Malik. The “war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of dunking,” and the “architects of this war have made a virtue out of stupidity.” The conflict “feels like the first of its kind in the modern age: distinctly remote and profoundly ignorant.”
‘Doctors should be paid to keep patients healthy’
Ashish K. Jha and Thomas C. Tsai at The Boston Globe
Experience “points to a promising idea that has been at the center of health care reform for more than a decade: Instead of paying doctors and hospitals for every test and procedure they perform, pay them for keeping patients healthy,” say Ashish K. Jha and Thomas C. Tsai. In this “model, called value-based care, doctors and hospitals are paid based on the health outcomes they achieve and the overall cost of caring for their patients.”
‘Energy crises must accelerate the fight against climate change’
Le Monde editorial board
As the “U.S.-Israeli war against Iran enters its third week, hopes for a short, contained crisis without major consequences for the global energy market have faded,” says the Le Monde editorial board. But the “absence of supply disruptions should not obscure the main point.” The “structural vulnerability of our economies to imported crises remains, now manifesting through price volatility, strategic uncertainty and the weakening of industrial supply chains.” This is “what makes this crisis different and politically decisive.”
