Jan 26 2012
You may know there are two conventions for representing historical years: the traditional A.D. and B.C., and the chic new C.E. and B.C.E. (if you don’t know about that, Wikipedia will get you up to speed). People often ask me why I use one or the other, or what (as a historian) I think we …
Jan 24 2012
Lucas’s new film is good but not excellent. There were elements of it that disappointed me. But it may be worth your support anyway. Here’s why… Red Tails is a movie just released honoring the Tuskegee airmen, an often unrecognized unit of black fighter pilots in WWII. For those who don’t know the backstory, George …
Jan 18 2012
If you are wondering what all the worldwide hubbub is over Congress’s attempt to fast-track the latest anti-piracy legislation (SOPA and PIPA) without much public scrutiny (you may be wondering, since Google has blacked out it’s logo in protest, and Wikipedia has shut down entirely for the whole day), then if you read nothing else, …
Jan 16 2012
Our own Ian Cromwell (the one and only Crommunist) posted today on the Schroedinger’s Rapist metaphor and the pushback against it that uses racism as an example (if you don’t know the back story, Daniel Finke provides). Ian’s thesis is this: I’ve frequently heard people object to the Schroedinger’s Rapist argument as sexist, with anti-black …
Jan 12 2012
Did Obama sign a law granting the Presidency power to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial? No, he did not. This is yet another manufactured story from the irrational left, which simply ignores the actual facts, like so many a Tea Partier would. I have always advised people not to trust the media implicitly but …
Jan 06 2012
Herod the Great (you know, that guy in the Bible who killed all those babies, but didn’t really) was a procurator. (WTF is a procurator? Don’t worry, I’ll get to that.) In fact, Herod wasn’t just any procurator. He was the chief procurator of the entire Roman province of Syria. Holy crap! That’s amazing! Er…or …
Jan 05 2012
There’s often a lot of hostility toward “government regulations.” I’m going to muse on that today, with a long general contemplation on the whole nature of this fashionable outrage. It comes in all varieties. There are people who think laws are so needlessly complicated (a typical bill nowadays can be ten thousand pages long) that …
Jan 03 2012
A new interview of mine just went online. But you’ve got to hear the long boring story first. (Unless you don’t give a shit, then just go on to read the interview: The BestSchools Richard Carrier Interview). Recently a new “top fifty atheists in the world” list hit the web (similar to a previous list …
Jan 02 2012
Happy new year everyone! Today I’m going to blog a boring administrative thing. But later this week I’ll put up something a little more interesting. With my move now to Freethought Blogs the number of comments my entries are generating within a week has shot up fivefold or more. Which is great, except that it …
:)
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