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The Opening Argument

Jerusalem Demsas · 18 Aug 2026

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    A community with the power to punish economic offenses may eventually use that power in other realms of life.

    Their wordsBut it's also not an accident that a community with enough coercive power to punish someone for charging a lot for nails ends up using that coercive power in other realms of life as well.

  2. Our reading

    Different people can reason well and still arrive at very different beliefs.

    Their wordsBut a large part of our disagreement comes from the fact that different people, reasoning well, often end up believing very different things.

  3. Our reading

    Politics should not be the place where people find meaning.

    Their wordsBut where I depart from Murphy's call for meaning-making is that politics isn't where people should find meaning.

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