by Carl Howard | Jan 21, 2013 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Feminism and LGBT, Sex
[NOTE: the above headline is a statement of my opinion.] I’ll admit, I’ve always disliked Alain de Botton. In a previous post, I’ve described him as a sanctimonious, pretentious, pseudointellectual asshole. That was based on a review of his latest book “How To Think...
by Carl Howard | Jan 7, 2013 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
Yes. (At least for many of the most useful definitions of machines/beasts.) But I guess there’s a lot more to it — or so a lot of bloviators would like us to believe. There are a lot of opinion pieces out there that decry the materialism/reductionism/scientism...
by Carl Howard | Dec 24, 2012 | Blog Topics, Feminism and LGBT, Philosophy, Society
With the US election being a boon for marriage equality, Australia’s had some additional coverage. In this context, it was almost expected that an open letter to Prime Minister Giliard went viral. Usually I avoid the comments sections of such opinion pieces, not...
by Carl Howard | Dec 12, 2012 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Race, Resources, Food and Environment, Society
A follow-up from the last post, I’ve recently had a change of mind about the idea of “first world problems”. For those not familiar, this is a hash tag on Twitter and a general internet trope that you add on to a complaint you make. It’s meant to show that you...
by Carl Howard | Dec 11, 2012 | Blog Topics, Medicine, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Science and Skepticism
There’s a pretty common view that as a society we’re inappropriately overmedicalising ourselves in terms of psychological and psychiatric disorders. Some of the reasons given include: We’re self-centred and whiny first worlders who all have comfortable lives and...
by Carl Howard | Dec 4, 2012 | Atrocities and Oppression, Blog Topics, Charity and Philanthropy, Society
The headline is shamelessly plundered from this post by Greg Laden. The original context was indeed about ElevatorGate, so do get more detail there, not here. Greg’s title very aptly describes a certain style of argument. Basically, the idea is that when someone...
