This site exists because I got tired of choosing between two bad answers.
Somewhere along the way the two sides seemed to divide the world between them, each taking a share of what is good and a share of what is not, then asking me to accept the whole package. I couldn’t. Not out of cleverness, and not to hold myself above it. I couldn’t sign for the part I thought was wrong, on either side, and nobody was offering a version without it.
Part of that is my faith. I’m an Orthodox Christian, and not a very good one, which is the ordinary condition of the thing. But Orthodoxy doesn’t sort wrongdoing into tiers, the way a ledger lets you settle a smaller debt and move on. Sin is sin. And paying for something, or voting for it, is a kind of participation. That leaves me without the arithmetic other people use to make their peace with a party. It isn’t fastidiousness. It’s just that the discount was never available to me.
So I stopped picking a team, and found out what that costs. I should say plainly where I stand now: I came to this as a centrist, and in recent years I’ve found myself drifting steadily to the right. Not because a party earned it, but because of what I’ve watched happen, and I’ll argue the particulars in the essays rather than ask you to take the label. I still can’t sign the whole package from either side. People assume you’re secretly the other thing, and refusing to choose reads as a judgment on their choice, though it isn’t one. That’s a good deal of what these essays are about: what it’s like to stand where almost nobody is standing, and what you can see from there.
I write about culture, society, politics and technology, which is a grand way of saying I write about what the arguing is doing to us. I try to be accurate. Where something can be checked, I check it and show you where I looked. Where I’m giving an opinion, I say so. When I get something wrong I’d rather correct it in the open than quietly delete it.
One thing I have had to learn, and it did not come easily: to judge less. We all make judgments; it is how anyone gets through a day. But holding a view about an argument is a different thing from holding a verdict about a person, and I have been on the wrong side of that distinction often enough to want to stop. What I want out of the rest of my life is to live it in freedom, peace and harmony. These essays are written by someone trying to do that, not by someone looking for a fight.
I don’t take comments. Not because disagreement is unwelcome, but because a comment thread belongs to whoever shouts longest, and that isn’t a fair hearing for either of us. Write to me instead. I read everything that arrives. If a letter deserves publishing, I’ll ask you first.
Nothing here tracks you. No advertising, no analytics, nothing sold or shared. The privacy page is short, and accurate.
I’m not asking you to agree with me. I’m asking you to consider that the argument is worth having honestly.