One of the things I like the most about being a member of the freethought community is the fact that we, as members, prize debate and conversation above fawning civility. At least on the internet – maybe people are very different in meatspace. There are no sins in the freethoughtverse, except offering up a shitty …
Monthly Archive: October 2011
Oct 21 2011
Movie Friday: Special Investigation – Evolution
One of the things that drives me nuts is when people enter into an argument without actually listening to the other side’s perspective. When I was in high school we had instructions in how to debate, and one of the specific roles we were told to fill on our debate teams was to have someone …
Oct 20 2011
Greta says it so I don’t have to
One of the frustrating things about this blog is that I have a lot of stuff I like to talk about, but limited time/energy/motivation to cover it all. I also worry about losing focus and having this Manifesto turn into a diffuse leftist whine-zine. The thing that is particularly frustrating is when I get e-mails …
Oct 20 2011
Reminder: Victor Stenger in Vancouver this weekend!
Hey all you skeptical Vancouverites! Looking for some hot skeptic-on-skeptic action this Saturday? Have we got a treat for you! Centre For Inquiry Vancouver is pleased to present a lecture by particle physicist and New York Times best-selling author Dr. Victor Stenger, titled ‘Science and God’. “Science is based on the objective observation of the world …
Oct 20 2011
Why are you hitting yourself? Part 2: Sticking up for the big guy
This is part 2 of an ongoing discussion of a paper by Jost, Banaji and Nosek discussing System Justification Theory. Read Part 1. We left off the previous post looking at system justification theory, and the intersection of three competing motivations for behaviour: ego (“I like me”), group (“I like us”) and system justification (“I …
Oct 20 2011
Why Are You Hitting Yourself? An intro to System Justification Theory
By request, here are links to Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4. Read Part 5. Read Part 6. Read Part 7. Read Part 8. So I’m not sure what your impression of the way I run things around here is, but let me tell you that my info gathering process is incredibly haphazard. Every morning I browse through …
Oct 19 2011
Absolute speech freedom? Absolutely!
Blogging requires a bit of a thick skin, or at least a certain amount of self-assuredness. The more people scrutinizing your ideas, the more likely you are to have people openly disagree with you. I recognize that I am breathing fairly rarefied air, here at Freethought Blogs – most of the people reading my posts already agree …
Oct 19 2011
Canada’s hate speech laws collide with reality
For those of you who are noticing an alarming trend in my writing, I will come clean: I really like Canada. So much so, that I can’t seem to shut up about it. I’d apologize, but a) I’m not sorry, and b) I know that this glut of Canadiana is a passing phase, and I’ll …
Oct 18 2011
Learning from South Africa’s new rich
So this morning I announced that I was going to go into greater depth into the story of the rising wealthy class in South Africa. There was a lot of fertile ground in that story, and some important other issues that I think deserve a more generous portion of the spotlight than I could devote …
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