A Honour And An Privilege

Ah, the notorious QRG. I never quite know with her which way things are going to go, but this time she’s got a point. The idea of “privilege” in discussions about inequality, of any kind, is a prickly one, best handled delicately if at all. In theory, it’s trying to describe a thing that does [...]

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I hereby award myself all your money

It’s another anarchistastic day here at Cubik’s Rube. Here’s an excerpt of a book by a guy called Larken Rose, in which he makes some interesting points about government as a religious belief. Here’s a video in which he argues against the US Constitution. He makes a case worth considering. Specifically, he sets out to [...]

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Politics via religion

So, you know how Occam’s Razor says that, all other things being equal, you should place more trust in the simpler explanation to some unknown problem? Atheists often use this to highlight the untenability of the God hypothesis. The origins of God are at least as mysterious and enigmatic as those of the Universe, and [...]

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Who’s this Ed guy who knows so much, anyway?

Yes, what Holly said. Relationships Ed. She’s talked in previous posts about how relationships can often hold more potential pitfalls for young people than sex itself. Understanding your feelings and those of other people is certainly tied in with the physical safety side of sex ed, and I’ve tended to support them both under the [...]

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Tax of the taxless

And while we’re talking about taxes and whatnot, there’s an excellent post at Skeptic Money that looks at the popular claim that half of Americans “don’t pay taxes”. That’s how Rick Warren put it in a tweet recently, expressing his annoyance that so many of his countryfolk have so little income that the law currently [...]

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Taxing the job creators

You may recall that yesterday I explained to some five-year-olds how the economy works. Today, the over-simplified political discourse continues. The opposition to raising taxes on the extremely wealthy generally comes down the value of their status as “job creators”. People and corporations with incomes well into the millions or billions of dollars provide employment [...]

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Mo’ spending, mo’ problems

So, Reason magazine. Any thoughts? I’ve been following their online presence for a while. For some reason, I had the preconception that they were mostly focused on religion, secularism, and rationality, but I may have been thinking of someone else. Reason predominantly cover politics, and they’re an interesting crowd. Even when I’m not entirely on [...]

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Now, am I a believer?

SCIENCE! It’s not just for white-coated nerds. In particular, there was a recent experiment carried out on the Unequally Yoked blog, with a certain degree of scientific rigour, referred to as an Ideological Turing Test. In this case, instead of trying to figure out whether they were conversing with a human or a computer program, [...]

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Keep Calm and Smash the State

You can add this to the list of things which substantially boost my sympathies toward anarchism, even while I don’t understand the politics well enough to full subscribe to them. The City Of Westminster Counter Terrorist Focus Desk put out a recent notification containing this important advice on public safety: Anarchism is a political philosophy [...]

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Atheists make people Cross

The US government’s throwing money at religious symbolism again, and the American Atheists have launched a lawsuit against it. For once, though, I’m not really on the atheists’ side. In the rubble left by the destruction of the twin towers by terrorist-hijacked planes on 9/11, a couple of steel beams were found, maybe 15 feet [...]

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