The spikiest speech bubbles usually have the fewest strong points.

It’s a fascinating paradox: we live in a time with the easiest means to disseminate ideas that humans have ever had access to, and yet so much about the free exchange of ideas seems to be getting worse, not better. The supposed truisms simply aren’t holding up.

Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?

This article (the whole thing is illuminating) touches on what may be the single biggest obstacle to widespread progress in today’s world. In order for an exchange of ideas, we have to be willing and able to trade beyond our (self-imposed, largely digital/media-based) borders.

Since “more speech” alone doesn’t seem to be helping… what might actually help the best ideas win out?

What changes to how our biggest platforms operate could help achieve those goals?

Only a couple of the kids died; the rest had a GREAT time.

I grew up in a small town, in a neighborhood with lots of kids. We played army games, or hide and seek, or rode bikes around the block, mostly with very little supervision. Sometimes we got hurt. It seemed pretty normal to us.

Some parents today are wondering where that kind of play went, and in response to the trend of helicopter parenting and intense supervision, are trying to actively create a culture of more freedom and independence for their kids. Via NYT:

“Think about your own 10 best memories of childhood, and chances are most of them involve free play outdoors,” Mike is fond of saying. “How many of them took place with a grown-up around? I remember that when the grown-ups came over, we stopped playing and waited for them to go away. But moms nowadays never go away.”

Then he built what many kids would call the coolest yard ever (pictured above) to encourage more physical play and even risk-taking.

Is this a necessary corrective, or an unnecessary risk?

How much danger and freedom is the right amount for healthy kids?

Do you think you had too little, too much, or just the right amount of freedom and danger in your own childhood?

When we reward law-breakers with more puppy access, we’ve definitely screwed up.

This topic is a hot one. I am not even going to attempt to address it personally, other than to voice that as I personally see more and more of these stories, particularly in campus environments, it’s hard for me not to question if something has gone haywire in what we label as unacceptable behavior worthy of regulating.

Luckily this Atlantic article, “How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm”, does a much better (and much longer) job, not only addressing how it came to be, but both the benefits and potential dangers of a heightened sense of what’s allowable and what’s over the line. One researcher quoted in the article puts it simply:

A university that tries to protect students from words, ideas, and graffiti that they find unpleasant or even disgusting is doing them no favors. It is setting them up for greater suffering and failure when they leave the university and enter the workplace. Tragically, the very students who most need the strength to face later discrimination are the ones rendered weakest by victimhood culture on campus.

You really ought to read this one. By framing it around the term “concept creep” and addressing it academically, we’re given a much more rational way to digest and discuss a strange symptom of today’s evolving discourse. Which is just what people love to discuss over beers, right? So.

How does this trend make you feel? Has it affected you personally?

Are you happy to put up with the negative effects for the positive gains? Or vice versa?

Have we reached a tipping point, or will this go even farther? How far can it go?

“I will not waiver in my belief: that my beliefs matter than the beliefs of others.”

The New Yorker puts a cap on the Kim Davis affair with a simple question-slash-concern for what this whole messy business means going forward:

The controversy in Davis’s county may now end without another confrontation (or incarceration). If the marriages are valid with her deputies’ signature, then that will probably defuse the situation. But the principle is still a troubling one—that religious belief carries with it a shopping-cart approach to citizenship. You can choose some obligations but not others, while the legislators and judges figure out which ones are really mandatory. It’s a recipe for further division in an already polarized society—and the prospects, in Kentucky and elsewhere, are for more conflict, not less.

My personal opinion aside (if you must know, I believe the whole thing could have been easily avoided without legal action, but the fuss did bring out an awful lot of idiocy, generally), the bigger issues do provide room for debate.

Whether you agree or not with Kim Davis in this instance, should people have the right to be excused from performing specific job tasks because of personal belief?

Is that answer the same when they are holding elected office?

In the balance between a personal freedom issue and a separation of church and state issue, which takes priority?

We’re not even talking full hive-mind assimilation or anything.

Rick and Morty practically deserves its own section on this site; every episode raises a deep existential question or moral dilemma then skewers it mercilessly through insane sci-fi comedy.

A recent episode in particular dealt with a hive-mind called “Unity”, which assimilated all the individuals on a planet, where they lived peacefully and prosperously. The kids, thinking they were liberators, freed some of the assimilated… who then went on to spark a race war. Tricky stuff.

In light of the current racial violence plaguing the country, it’s tough not to wonder if a little reprogramming would be helpful enough to make it worth the obvious violation. So:

Scientists discover a foolproof way to brainwash/reprogram the minds of every American to eliminate racism. It’s painless and has no other side effects. To make all our lives easier, they want to make this mandatory, as long as it passes as a ballot measure in the next election.

Would you vote for this measure?

Would you feel like you were giving up some meaningful freedom by doing so?

If for, how would you convince those resistant? If against, how do you defend your side?