Category: Opinion

Source: Persuasion
by Sam Kahn

“Institutions need to uphold standards. No exceptions.” (08/03/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/jason-ardays-fabulism-is-an-institutional

Source: The Price of Liberty
by Nathan Barton

“There was nothing ‘instinctive’ about Mr. Salinas[s]’ actions. He trained and trained, and he used what he taught himself and applied it. Just as anyone that has a single ounce of civic duty should. Civic duty is far more than going out and informing yourself and voting wisely, well-beyond ‘being a good citizen’ and paying your taxes and driving at the posted speed limit. One key civic duty is to be able, prepared, and above all, willing, to defend yourselves, your family and friends, your community, and even your enemies.” (08/03/26)

https://thepriceofliberty.org/2026/08/03/civic-duty-or-vigilantism/

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Maddie Daly

“The Senate Commerce Committee is poised to consider the Youth AI Privacy Act, a bill that would require AI companies to create kids-only privacy rules and implement so-called ‘safe design features,’ which would—like three other bills under consideration this week—require more data collection and make it harder for people to access lawful speech online. While the bill is narrower than some other proposed chatbot bills, it still has massive data security implications because it protects information for only certain users.” (08/03/26)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/youth-ai-privacy-acts-privacy-paradox

Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson

“[I]n fairness to Rose, this logic fail is one he shares with virtually all right-libertarian polemicists. These people will deny that businesses whose profits result from state subsidies, protections, or artificial property rights exemplify ‘real capitalism’ — and then turn around and celebrate as an ‘accomplishment of capitalism’ a product like the iPhone, created by a corporation whose entire profit model depends on intellectual property, government subsidies, and neoliberal foreign policy. … all of the things Rose celebrates came into being because of investments from people with a ‘crap ton of money’ in the same sense that everything people consumed in the USSR came into being because of state-owned industry and Gosplan.” (08/03/26)

https://c4ss.org/content/61260

Source: The American Prospect
by Robert Kuttner

“Over the weekend, it looked as if President Trump had backed himself into a corner in his efforts to get Todd Blanche confirmed as attorney general. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who was recently primaried by Trump ally Ken Paxton yet remains a key vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee for the rest of the year, wasn’t budging in his insistence that Blanche commit in writing to killing the corrupt deal in which the government set up a $1.776 billion slush fund to compensate supposed victims of government violence and Trump personally got immunity from IRS audits. Trump himself poured oil on the flames in a series of comments and social media posts in which he walked back his previous commitment to end the slush fund and further insulted Cornyn and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who was following Cornyn’s lead.” (08/04/26)

https://prospect.org/2026/08/04/republican-senators-pretend-to-constrain-trump/

Source: The UnPopulist
by Tim Ganser

“How a country shaped by its fascist past is on the verge of watching the far-right party close in on control.” (08/03/26)

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/germanys-afd-is-closer-than-ever

Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
by Ron Paul

“The war which was supposed to last a couple of weeks and ‘pay for itself’ is entering into its sixth month and the price tag so far is above $100 billion. A war that was started to thwart an Iranian nuclear threat that according to US Intelligence didn’t exist has become a war to open a waterway – the Hormuz Strait – that was open before the war started. … There is no path to victory in the war. It is now only about how to manage defeat.” (08/03/26)

http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/call-off-the-iran-war-just-walk-away

Source: The Realist Review
by James W Carden

“Surveying the devastation wrought by the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the Nigerian writer and former secretary general of African workers, Owei Lakemfa, concludes that ‘humanity is moving back to the pre-World War era when there were no agreed universal rules, might was right.’ Today, writes Lakemfa, ‘strongmen, and nations roam around as terrorists and bandits playing God. The strongest is the Zelensky, Netanyahu, and Trump triumvirate.’ This is how the world outside of NATO and Tel Aviv sees things. This might spur a normal country run by normal people to question the wisdom of its current course. Needless to say, in 2026, the US is no such country.” (08/03/26)

https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/the-new-big-three

Source: Liberalism.org
by Shal Marriott

“Liberalism, which fundamentally defends a baseline commitment to pluralism, is at its core dedicated to the idea that we can agree to disagree. Toleration is represented not only through the political debates we engage in—it means that we, as individuals, are tolerant of one another. In a public sphere that is filled with polarized discourse, where the stakes of the present moment seem so exhaustingly high, and one’s own views are in need of a firm defense, an appeal to toleration becomes even more difficult. This makes it worth revisiting one of the age-old subjects of debates within the liberal tradition: what ought we, as liberals, to tolerate?” (08/03/26)

https://www.liberalism.org/p/liberal-toleration-and-ordinary-vices

Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger

“When [Samuel] Tunick arrived at the airport, he was taken aside for special interrogation, where his luggage and his diary were subjected to careful search. They then asked for his cell phone, claiming that Tunick was suspected of possessing child pornography. It was a lie. According to an article at CNN.com, during a court hearing last week, officials admitted that they had no reason to suspect that Tunick possessed child-abuse material. They just made it up, knowing that nothing would happen to them if they were caught lying to an American citizen. Here comes the funny part. Tunick turned over his cell phone to them and gave them the password — well, not his regular password but instead a special password. When they punched in the special password, it activated software that automatically wiped the entire cellphone clean. All data gone. Poof! That is absolutely awesome.” (08/03/26)

https://www.fff.org/2026/08/03/a-fantastic-and-very-funny-act-of-civil-disobedience/