A life in words

  • Quidism: the belief that things matter

    The belief that nothing has objective or inherent meaning – commonly called nihilism – is quite popular these days. In some ways I’m sympathetic: if you come to reject or at least harbor serious skepticism of the existence of a non-material, spiritual realm, and that’s where you put ultimate meaning, then brute material reality seemingly…

  • Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    The core cause of unaffordable housing is there not being enough housing.

  • Prof. Mark Davies’ ouster at BYU

    Mark Davies was a professor of linguistics at BYU who created tools for analyzing large collections of text, a method known as corpus analysis. He ran a website, corpus.byu.edu, where these text collections were available for anyone to use. The site, now at english-corpora.org, and Dr. Davies’ website, describe a process of administrator mismanagement that…

The principal difficulty lies, and the greatest care should be employed in constituting this Representative Assembly. It should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them. That it may be the interest of this Assembly to do strict justice at all times, it should be an equal representation, or in other words equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it. Great care should be taken to effect this, and to prevent unfair, partial, and corrupt elections.John Adams, Thoughts on Government, April 1776