A life in words

  • Separation of race and state: a response to Coleman Hughes and Jamelle Bouie

    The most delicious thing in the world is a good discussion of a critical issue. That’s what we got in Open to Debate’s conversation between Coleman Hughes and Jamelle Bouie on the topic of color-blindness with regard to race. It was a great debate. I think Jamelle was most effective in pointing out that civil…

  • Conversation with a pacifist

    Conversation with a pacifist

    The city I was born in (Richland, Washington) was created by the federal government as part of the effort to synthesize the plutonium used in the Fat Man bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. As such I feel not responsible for, but somehow tangled up in, the legacy of that development, especially since reading Black Rain by…

  • Audio: Drumming by Seattle Kokon Taiko

    Recorded on my Galaxy S10 at From Hiroshima to Hope, 6 Aug 2023, Green Lake Park, Seattle. No copyright infringement intended. Recommend listening through headphones or good speakers.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion…. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations…. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form….John Stuart Mill, On LIberty