My gender could beat up your gender

This blog, above all else, is committed to the truth. And, in that spirit of providing you with honest and accurate commentary, I’m not even going to look up the names of those two football people who got told off or fired or something for being sexist dicks. If I started doing research like that, [...]

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Astrologers keep feeling sure

I’m really not interested in this story, but it’s starting to feel a little remiss of me not to at least mention it. Recently, the media made a big hoo-hah over the fact that the constellations aren’t where they used to be in the sky, because of shifts in the way the Earth moves. This [...]

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It’s not easy being criminally negligent

Dr Kermit Gosnell, if the allegations made against him are to be believed, should be locked up for life. He apparently spent decades performing illegal abortions, with inadequate equipment and untrained staff, causing untold harm to hundreds of women and a number of deaths. No doubt many will miss the point, but as PZ points [...]

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Armchair skeptics

Joe Nickell is one of the big dogs of skepticism. Less well known on my side of the pond, perhaps, but still a huge deal in the world of skeptical inquiry, particularly as regards paranormal investigations. He’s done a huge amount of work over a number of decades, exploring claims of supernatural phenomena, assessing bizarre [...]

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Why Not Be A Dick?

It’s time for an Ultimate Showdown. In July 2010, Phil Plait gave a speech espousing a hippie philosophy of universal love and harmony, in which he called for an end to any expressions of anger and aggression, and declared that the one true path allows only peace and tolerance for all our fellow men, no [...]

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Two blogs good

Bloggers are being encouraged to put themselves forward for the Orwell Prize. The deadline’s tomorrow, so if you can quickly muster together ten blog articles you posted in 2010 which you think may go some way toward “making political writing into an art”, then why not put your name forward? There’s no entry fees, and [...]

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Feminiskepticism

Here’s a crude paraphrasing of a conversation I’ve heard a few times lately, in blogs and comment threads. (The first speaker is female.) “Men tend to outnumber women in the skeptical community. At events and meet-ups, most of the attendees and speakers tend to be men. I feel like women might be under-represented and may [...]

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Rock Star Wars of Science

I’m finished with the catch-up posts from my time in the wilderness now. But, if you already miss my disconnected and untimely ramblings on old news that you’d forgotten about some time ago, fear not! Sometimes it just takes me weeks to have an opinion on something. I didn’t say much about any of this [...]

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Sensitivity

An episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! from a couple of seasons back dealt with “Sensitivity Training“. They laid into those office seminars and such, which expect participants to make awkward conversation in circumstances contrived to help everyone understand the difficulties faced by minorities in everyday life. It’s well intentioned stuff designed to counteract prejudice [...]

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Catching up: Atheism and anarchism

While I was offline for a month, I kept a note of any links and news stories worth commenting on. Now that I’m back, I’m aiming to post two short items a day here, about stuff that happened during my online absence, until I’ve cleared the backlog. This is one of those. Although I’ve decided, [...]

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