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Studies in Mediumship
As someone who spends a fair amount of time reading philosophy, I find that I have pretty strong commitments to physicalism/materialism (i.e. the physical world is all that there is, and all non-physical things can be reduced to physical objects). I’m also extremely confident that any forces that can affect objects over long distances have…
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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…
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Anti-Fluoridation is Science Illiteracy
A few days ago, as part of a twitter conversation I was having with the basically anonymous @SafeWaterHfx, I was sent an article in support of their claims that fluoride shouldn’t be added to municipal tap water. The anti-fluoridation crowd make a lot of noise online (they’re not unlike the anti-wifi folk in that regard), but…
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Anti-GMO == Climate Change Denialism
I generally don’t like to reblog things, but this piece should be spread far and wide. It should be a deep embarrassment to progressives, but the truth is that anti-GM activists are as guilty of anti-scientific thinking with regard to their pet subject as the Koch Brothers or the American Enterprise Institute are on global…
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Astrology Now!
I’m a big fan of science education, and those institutions whose reason for being is the furthering of knowledge, and the encouraging of the young to follow math-based ambitions. That stuff is hard, and requires a whole heap of enthusiasm and motivation in order to slog through. Conversely, it’s somewhat shocking when I find a space…
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A Secret Confession
I have a secret to confess. This isn’t the kind of thing that’s likely to be popular with atheists (or skeptics in general), but I have to get it off my chest: I think Ken Ham is amazing. I think that he’s the best thing to happen to religious-secular dialog ever. Before you shut the browser tab/window,…
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Astrology, Bullshit Raised to an Art-Form
Generally speaking, I stay away from the main Skeptic topics. Mostly because they are so obviously wrong, and also because the topic is well-addressed by people who don’t have an additional interest in economics and social reform (the main topics I address on this blog). But scammer-extraordinaire Matthew Currie has decided to loudly object to…
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Your Food Is Killing You!!!
Sometimes terrible things (for a certain value of ‘terrible’) make their way onto your Facebook feed, and sometimes it’s important to dissect them, to display their entirely non-functional innards to the world. To proclaim “Really? I mean, really? You believed this?” In a transparent attempt to latch on to the general list-mania that Buzzfeed and others use…
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Evidence For ‘Religion Causes People to do Evil’
I’ve been thinking about religion being the cause of people doing evil a little more recently, and I’ve been trying to think of what would make a more compelling argument. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely anti-religion, but I’m also anti-crappy-argument. (Although some people I’ve discussed this with online have taken my latter stance to mean…
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What Zombie Movies Can Tell Us About Racism
A good buddy of mine, Ian Cromwell, has uploaded he did a talk a while back on racism in society, and how Zombie-ism (and zombie movies) can help us understand how we should deal with the problem as it occurs in the wild. It’s broken down over a couple of youtubes, and can be found…
