Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Here's an article that explains why it's more accurate to call the American presidential election Election Week, instead of Election Day. In brief, different states have different rules, and some states, such as swing states Georgia and Pennsylvania, do not allow the counting of in-person early voting ballots or absentee ballots until Election Day, and other states, such as North Carolina and Ohio, accept absentee ballots postmarked Election Day or the day before. Trump's announcement of an attempt to stop the counting after Election Day is a blatant effort to deprive Americans of their vote. Any fair-minded person will want every vote counted, as long as the ballot followed the rules of the state in which it was cast. This delay in proclaiming a winner may prolong the tension, both psychological and social, but this wait, not a real delay, is necessary to ensure that every valid vote ...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Facebook's refusal to take down Trump's false ads has generated great controversy and backlash. Its own employees have just published an open letter urging Mark Zuckerberg to reconsider his policy towards political ads. While thinking about this question, I recalled vaguely some slogan that went like "the solution to bad speech is more speech." Looking it up on the internet sent me on a crash course on U.S. law on free speech. The debate on free speech and its limits is of long standing, but the course of the development of U.S. law has clearly been towards the expansion of free speech against arbitrary limits. In the 19th century, the common practice was called prior restraint, defined as censorship imposed by a government or institution that prohibits particular instances of expression. To give an example from a different jurisdiction, the Singapore government's ban of Tan Pin Pin...