by Carl Howard | Oct 23, 2012 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Society, Travel
I’ve finished my series of posts on Central Asia. (You can find the full list here.) I wanted to write some sort of wrap-up and it may as well address what’s been bothering me about the whole trip and the region. The problems faced by the region are immense. But it’s...
by Carl Howard | Oct 4, 2012 | Blog Topics, Feminism and LGBT, Philosophy, Race
A while ago, one of my friends started a discussion on Facebook about porn. The question was something like: is porn “morally good or morally bad”? I thought I’d be the Socratic asshole and noticed that it was telling that the question even makes sense — if you...
by Carl Howard | Sep 27, 2012 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Ethics, Philosophy
The recent post on anti-bullying got me thinking about the irrational way we humans tend to assign people responsibility when they do something bad or careless. Here’s the meme again: The boy you punched in the hall today. Committed suicide a few minutes ago. That...
by Carl Howard | Aug 30, 2012 | Atheism and Religion, Blog Topics, Philosophy
Different apologists have different styles. One style is to be an academic apologist who is often associated with rigour and intellectualism in the eye of their audience. They often have academic posts and might have a reasonable and decent collection of published...
by Carl Howard | Aug 21, 2012 | Atheism and Religion, Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Travel
The next country I went to after Turkmenistan is Iran. There are plenty of misconceptions about Iran in all countries (not just developed Western ones). Given that the situation has deteriorated a lot since my visit in Oct 2011, there will probably be even more...
by Carl Howard | Aug 16, 2012 | Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, History, Mind, Psychology and Consciousness, Science and Skepticism, Society
A few weeks ago, I was out with 3 friends and the conversation turned to the increasing prevalence of technology especially with smartphones being so common. I believe that all three of them agreed that this was a definite negative. People would turn increasingly...
