A life in words

  • Age verification: a moral panic

    Age verification: a moral panic

    Senator Frame, Representatives Berry and Reed, I’m writing to oppose the imposition of age verification requirements for online services in the State of Washington. The laws before the legislature on this topic and similar laws in other states are not privacy-preserving, but enable surveillance, risk identity theft, and suppress free expression on the internet, which…

  • The Constitution Is Cool

    The Constitution Is Cool

    Like a neglectful car owner who postpones the next oil change, we don’t talk about the U.S. Constitution enough, don’t listen to its hum and sputters enough, and aren’t doing enough to set in order the problems impairing the long-term functioning of a free government. One of the few institutions where people are talking seriously…

  • Recommended listen: Can President Trump Invoke the Insurrection Act Over the Objections of State Governors?

    People call the president a “conservative”, but this is only true in the culture war sense; the rest is about blindly trampling the status quo, both dysfunctional things like neglected immigration enforcement, and vital principles like a limited executive and free speech. This is a good listen on the history of the Insurrection Act, and…

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