Sashi Sabaratnam

Living at the intersection of policy, research, & practice in wildfire mitigation. Former mayor of Mill Valley. Opinions my own & not reflective of my employer.

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

I was mayor of Mill Valley in 2020, and that experience led me to sign the resolution. At the time, I also signed onto the Great Barrington Declaration. The powers of the public health officer enshrined in the California Health and Safety Code are shockingly broad, as I noted in a paper I wrote in 2022 excerpted below.

[Libby Emmons @libbyemmons]

End the war. Save the republic.

[Lenore Skenazy @FreeRangeKids]

My letter in today's @NYTimes boils down to:

Maybe what kids really need is not more $ for mental health interventions but more independence and free play.

At least try that FIRST.

https://t.co/AJ6yodANaW

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

@nickgillespie The Peanuts gang are still a presence in Santa Rosa! No Shermy, though.

[Kevin Spillane @SpillaneCa]

I spent junior high in West Berlin. I NEVER thought the Berlin Wall would fall in my lifetime. It was gone only 12 years later. Why I remain an eternal optimist and believer in human rights and freedom!

[Anthony Bradley @drantbradley]

This may be one of the best explanations of male depression that I’ve ever heard. This is explains why guys are suicidal and their friends, parents, and/or wives don’t even know it. This is also why a man can be married with kids, great job, etc. & feel lonely & depressed.

[Libby Emmons @libbyemmons]

I'm sharing the lifetime reading list from my high school English teacher. He loved books, thought deeply, and told us that during the War he always had a paperback in his back pocket to escape into.

*not my checkmarks, had to get a copy from a friend after losing mine

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

@libbyemmons I can just smell it

[Alice @RationalBlonde]

I'm begging Jensen Huang to reconcile with his wife. we cannot afford another billionaire ex-wife entering her "I'm going to fix society by funding its most annoying people" era

[Elizabeth Nolan Brown @ENBrown]

It's just adult websites, do you want kids watching porn?

It's just social media, do you want kids being bullied?

It's just ... ebay and depop?

Yeah. Age verification was obviously never going to stop at the "bad" stuff and soon we're all going to be carded to buy used books

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

@StrangelEdweird Agreed! We can find some empathy for both sides here. People are imperfect messengers.

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

@StrangelEdweird Outrage also gives you comrades and connection, the way institutions used to.

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

@StrangelEdweird This speaks of what has been called the Meaning Crisis. If you have better things to do that give you a sense of meaning and purpose, it's hard to muster this kind of outrage. Absent that, you cast about looking for thin substitutes, which need constant reinforcement to persist.

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

Why is my feed clogged with long stories that all end with: "Watch it once. Remember it forever."

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

@glukianoff That hardly seems like the place...oh, you said, "discs"

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

It's rare to have so many thought leaders from across the political spectrum demonstrating unity in support of #FreeSpeech. There were moments when that was tested, like when a Soviet-born naturalized citizen pushed back against a Marxist panelists ideas. Principle won out at @TheFIREorg #soapbox2026.

[Nico Perrino @NicoPerrino]

Matt Taibbi with a beautiful reflection on @TheFIREorg's Soapbox conference:

"This, to me, is the difference between censors and freethinkers. For the former, the world is a narrow, obvious, uninteresting place. In their misery as tenants of this uninteresting pile of particles, they become impatient to correct its wrongs. . . .

"Freethinkers tend to be live more on the wonder side. When they get together, as Creeley noted last night by way of a John Locke quote, they do so to 'commiserate our mutual ignorance.'” (@mtaibbi)

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

That’s a wrap on FIRE’s 2026 free speech conference, Soapbox!

If this event showed us anything, it’s that our free speech rights are self-evident, but not self-executing. They depend on people like you who keep this movement alive.

Thank you to everyone who made it possible!

[Bearing Arms @BearingArmsCom]

Harmeet Dhillon Didn’t Just Talk About Defending the Second Amendment, She Did Something About It
https://t.co/IC951O8Cam

[Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair 🦥 @senatorshoshana]

A few years ago, I wrote a huge series on every problem I could think of with age verification policy, broken down by topic. I grew it over years! Left it at 13 parts.

Still extremely relevant, close to comprehensive, and useful if you want to understand better

[Sashi Sabaratnam @Sashi]

"Everyone wants free speech for things they agree with...it's up to us." @TheFIREorg #soapbox2026 @glukianoff #freespeech