It's trite to say that the world has gotten smaller in the age of globalization, but my travels have told me that it's wrong to think this means there is some kind of uniform world culture.
The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.
I was not able to understand how it could be right to pay an actor, or a singer, or an instrumentalist for entertaining the public and wrong to pay a ball player for doing exactly the same thing.
It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
The people currently in charge have forgotten the first principle of an open society, namely that we may be wrong and that there has to be free discussion. That it's possible to be opposed to the policies without being unpatriotic.
I know why we can't have a frank discussion with our policymakers - if you're in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.
What we say is that democracy means that you have the right to vote without intimidation and undue burdens. But if you stand in line for six hours, technically, today there is no document, no standard, no law that says that that's wrong.
