“Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”John Stuart Mill, On Liberty “Power to the people.” John Lennon What on earth is happening to this country? How, over the course of […]
Remember the primary way people used to sell things? Particularly the tinkers and snake-oil guys. They would try to trick you into believing what they were selling was something it wasn’t. “Buyer beware” was the motto (well, not their motto, but one nonetheless). The idea was, if you could get […]
We Already Have the Doctrine of Fully Informed Consent In June 2025, the newly mitred Pope Leo announced his support for the Rome Call for AI Ethics, issued by Vatican in 2020. The call received support in 2023 from representatives of Islam and Judaism. In July 2024 representatives from 20 global regions also […]
I’m starting to think a full-scale, nationwide compulsory digital ID won’t ever be a thing. Not officially, anyway. Not for quite a while. It’s a vibe I feel coming off the news that gels more with the current methodology – the indirect authoritarianism of the easier path. Piecemeal tyranny washed […]
Iused to think that people were pretty smart. Meaning if I were walking down the street, or through a crowded mall, I could be pretty certain that most people I ran into were at a certain level of intelligence. What do they say? That the average IQ is 100? And […]
“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”Hannah Arendt The government’s war on homelessness—much like its war on terrorism, its war on drugs, its war on illegal immigration, and its war on COVID-19—is yet another Trojan Horse. First, President Trump issues an executive order empowering federal agencies to clear […]
On 15 August, India will celebrate its Independence Day. There will be the usual celebratory flag-waving and flypasts in Delhi along with sound bites about ‘the world’s biggest democracy’. But what has ‘independence’ come to mean? Placing an X on a ballot paper every now and then does not constitute democracy. If […]
An op-ed in the New York Times is calling for a “new definition of death” so that we can increase the number of available donor organs. I’m not exaggerating, it’s right there in the headline: Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death. Sometimes you can only look […]
We covered the UK’s Online Safety Act Age Verification clause going live earlier this week. We’ve also covered the fact the UK is far from alone in this. Australia launched their “social media ban”, which is in reality just an age verification system, back in the spring. Now they’re expanding […]
That the United States of America is controlled by a criminally perverse, two party ruling class should be obvious to any reasonable (not rational, for the above-named people are very rational) person not living in what Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existential writer, called bad faith (mauvaise foi). Bad faith is […]