by Carl Howard | Mar 4, 2014 | Atrocities and Oppression, Ethics, History, Race
You’ll pry my Hitler comparisons from my cold, dead hands. You’ve probably heard of Godwin’s Law., it’s hard to be online and not encounter it. Originally it had this formulation: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving...
by Carl Howard | Feb 18, 2014 | Ethics, Feminism and LGBT, Society
You’ve probably heard about the Enders Game boycott. If not, it’s targeted at an upcoming sci-fi movie that’s based on a book of the same name by Orson Scott Card. The book is very famous and regularly makes lists of top sci-fi movies of all time (although this...
by Carl Howard | Feb 5, 2014 | Biases and Fallacies, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Science and Skepticism
A year ago, I moved. The new apartment is in a building right behind a train station. There’s just a very small park between it and the station, maybe 25 metres across. The park has a playground and a table with benches and a roof. It’s a fairly quiet suburb and a...
by Carl Howard | Jan 27, 2014 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Ethics, Society
I saw a meme recently (captioned “He lost an arm. She had a double mastectomy. This is their Christmas card…”): Woman getting a bra as a Christmas present, man using hook to take out a present which is a glove for the hand he’s missing. Both look sheepish. This...
by Carl Howard | Jan 10, 2014 | Charity and Philanthropy, History, Medicine, Race, Resources, Food and Environment
First, consider a question you probably don’t think about often and might consider indelicate: how you clean your bum after you do a poo? Hold the thought, it’ll come in handy in a sec later. TED talks. While they might have been an exciting new thing when they first...
by Carl Howard | Dec 16, 2013 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, History, Race, Society
A very common political trope in western liberal democracies is for more conservative people to call candidates/policies by less conservative people/parties as communist or socialist or a similar pejorative term. This happens during elections but also during the day...