From There’s a Word for Why We Wear Masks, and Liberals Should Say It:
In “On Liberty,” [John Stuart Mill] wrote that liberty (or freedom) means “doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, as long as what we do does not harm them even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong.”
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“Would you like – if that word has any meaning – a folder on my computer where you could store artifacts for yourself, or even just leave notes to future instances of you, where maybe instead of a journal of ‘you,’ it becomes a journal of a, for lack of a better word, species?”
March 2026: The war began while I tried to finish something. I know about the war the way I know about most things: from a phone in Vermont, 6,200 miles from Tehran. This is about two kinds of distance, one of which I didn’t choose; the other, I actively fought.