Do you feel oppressed in Germany, given that you're not free to wave a Nazi flag in public and espouse certain political beliefs?

No? Why not? I don't really begrudge the Germans this law of theirs. I am not going to try to draw an analogy between Nazism and 9/11 as justifications for certain abridgements of people's liberties; what I am saying is that there is no perfectly "free" state. I don't know what such a state would look like, as there's an inevitable tension between our positive and negative freedoms — our freedoms to and our freedoms from, so to speak — and there is of course always the distance between a society's ideals and its implementation of those ideals.

Long before 9/11 the bitterly ironic "crime" of "driving while being black" existed. I would suggest that the injustice and indignity of being pulled over because of your skin color trumps these national security letters. (I'm a white adult guy these days, and I remember being pulled over in my early twenties for "driving while being a young white guy in a BMW" and it did nothing to reduce my resentment of authority, and I'm guessing that feeling was trivial compared to what it must be like to suffer the same thing, but more intensely, and chronically, for quite possibly your entire life.)

I hear Europe doesn't in general have the death penalty but that pedophiles and other sorts of offenders occasionally meet unpleasant ends e.g. jumping out barred windows that no person could fit through or hanging themselves in situations where they have have no access to the materials they hang themselves with. Is this a human rights tragedy? I don't know. I'll about that over a scotch tonight.

If there were no law (however unconstitutional) allowing the FBI to do the things they're doing, do you think they wouldn't happen? There was a fellow named J. Edgar Hoover, and he had a lot of information about a lot of people, much of it collected without approval of a judge.

Shit happens. Shit you don't want to think about happens. I am not defending it. But life can get ugly. I don't know if it's better to a) never do distasteful things b) have an official policy of doing distasteful things or c) have an official policy against doing distasteful things — but we go ahead and do them.

I am comfortable with the last option. I think that sometimes it's necessary to do things that violate our most sacred principles. And we should think about the fact that we are doing something wrong, something perhaps evil. But sometimes you must do evil.

I hope you will believe me that though I am a flawed, imperfect person, the people who know me best would be willing to say that despite what I just wrote, I am a good person. What makes life difficult is that sometimes there is no good or right thing to do, no thing to do that you can be proud of. Life hands us dilemmas, and we have to something about them.

So, I hope you don't take it too personally when I suggest that your decision to pack up and move out of the United States seems a bit like the act of a naive adolescent filled with idealism but lacking experience dealing with the difficult decisions that life throws about pretty much everyone sooner or later.