by Carl Howard | Jun 9, 2015 | Atrocities and Oppression, Feminism and LGBT, Language, Sex, Society
I’ve got some breaking news: the internet is here to stay. Discounting major catastrophes, it’s going to become a larger and larger part of the lives of everyone on earth. So it’s time to stop treating it as some novel, completely separate part of human experience....
by Carl Howard | Jun 2, 2015 | Atrocities and Oppression, Charity and Philanthropy, Ethics, Resources, Food and Environment
[CN: Dehumanisation, crimes against humanity] In addition to the problems intrinsic to homelessness, homeless people often suffer from deliberate harm by others. For example, Social cleansing is the act of targeting people you deem “undesirable” for the...
by Carl Howard | May 26, 2015 | Language, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Science and Skepticism
Studies of ereading Studies about how reading paper books compares to reading electronic devices like a Kobo have gotten some attention in the media. Which makes sense because it’s often a chance to have a great moral panic about how technology is now ruining reading,...
by Carl Howard | May 19, 2015 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Ethics, Race
In the last few days, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (the living Boston marathon bomber) has been in the news again. Having been convicted on all counts in April, he has just now been sentenced to death by lethal injection. Coming off the recent executions of Andrew Chan and...
by Carl Howard | May 8, 2015 | Charity and Philanthropy, Resources, Food and Environment, Science and Skepticism, Society
In the last decade, we’ve seen an explosion in the media of country-based rankings/indexes that are meant to measure more than “just” traditional economic metrics like GDP. While GDP is an important measure that tells us something about what’s going on in a region,...
by Carl Howard | Apr 28, 2015 | Interesting Stuff, Science and Skepticism, Sex
[CN: Contains links to SFW pages on NSFW/porn sites] Everybody loves a good porn usage story in the mainstream media. The latest one to hit the rounds was this one from Salon/Alternet about the Middle East’s use of porn, but these stories do the rounds quite...
