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Bradley Miller, Judged
Professor Bradley Miller has been appointed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, effective January 16th, 2015. His bio there states that “his main areas of practice were commercial litigation, class actions, administrative law, constitutional law and human rights law”. And yet it would seem that his understanding of human rights is less than complete. In an article…
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“Rational” Should be Treated like a Four-Letter Word
[This is primarily a talk I gave at a Vancouver Skepticamp recently, with some expansion/clarification at the end in response to some feedback I received] I’d like to talk about how we use the word ‘rational’ in everyday conversations, and how we use it in skeptic/atheist/freethinker circles. I don’t consider anything I say here to…
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Walls of Words
[This essay is going to focus primarily on the skeptic/atheist community, as that’s the community I mostly interact with. I’m sure it holds true for others too, so don’t read this essay as me claiming that this is somehow unique to skeptics and/or atheists. Additionally, this essay only applies to people who want to discuss things…
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Firedrills Good, Active Shooter Drills Bad
Florida has recently been in the news for having ‘active shooter drills’. Alas, Florida is not alone in this, so the rest of the world can yet again sigh ‘only in America’. And let’s face it: this is yet more security theatre, serving no legitimate purpose. Like taking off one’s shoes at security in the…
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Speaking IS Doing.
As is often the case when someone says some terrible things, a furore occurs between the people who think that that person should be barred from speaking at certain locations (e.g. on a university campus), or even being allowed into a country, and those people who are profoundly confused about ‘freedom of speech’. A recent…
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Being ‘Homeless’ vs ‘a Resident’
It’s a fairly uncontroversial observation to note that Vancouver has a lot of people who are homeless, by which we mean that have no fixed address. Many of these people sleep in shelters, if they can get in on time, or on the streets if they can’t. This is, of course, in addition to the ‘invisible…
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Aslan and Tayler, Ships in the Night
In a recent article in Salon, Jeffrey Tayler goes on quite the tirade against Reza Aslan, and Aslan’s position that people who criticise Islam for what it says in the Koran are simply doing criticism wrong. Tayler, in a magnificent example of “Oh yeah?! Let me demonstrate exactly how correct you are!”, proceeds to sift out…
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The Right to Walk Away
Sue Blackmore has an article up on Richard Dawkins’s website regarding a hundred or so students who deigned to walk away from a lecture on memes she was giving. She expected “people to listen and then argue and disagree if they wished to” as opposed to exercising their right not to be denigrated or insulted by walking…
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Government Funding of Religious Schools
In many parts of Canada (and, of course, other parts of the world), there are two systems of schooling in place: a secular system that does not explicitly endorse any particular religious faith (though can implicitly do so), and an explicitly religious system. In Canada, both of these are funded by the government, and it’s…
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Langara College and the Bullshit it Peddles
When I first came to Vancouver from Ireland, I found out about the student loan program that was available in Canada and discovered that I could actually afford to go to University. I’d just missed the enrollment deadline for the University of British Columbia, but a helpful advisor there suggested a number of avenues I…
