critical thinking Archives • Richard Carrier Blogs

The Earth Will Be Destroyed Very Soon

Richard Carrier — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:43:07 +0000

The gargantuan amounts of money that are vanishing into the mysterious black hole of private equity (which is now collapsing because all that money has indeed vanished…somewhere) and AI (which is also vanishing…somewhere, because the data centers it was supposed to have been spent on don’t actually exist) cannot be explained. The disappearance of trillions […]

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How to Use Pseudo-AI

Richard Carrier — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 21:13:09 +0000

Pseudo-AI is garbage and a bubble. And AI content is banned in comments on my blog. Yet people are still gullibly over-trusting AI chatbots, constantly sending me chatbot content and gushing over how brilliant it is and proves whatever they want. I have to explain over and over again that they are being fooled and […]

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On Being Childish vs. Paying Attention: Buffoons vs. Bayes, Aristotle Edition

Richard Carrier — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:39:39 +0000

A childish Philosophical Muser tried claiming there are “errors” in this month’s article on The Historicity of Aristotle. And boy, if only you saw my DMs from this bozo. You will already get an idea from the article I just linked. But his DMs are worse, reflecting someone painfully immature and emotionally irrational, with no […]

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If Even Hobbits Could Build Advanced Civilizations, So Could Women: How Being Bad at Reasoning Sustains Antifeminist Mythologies

Richard Carrier — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:31:02 +0000

I dare the manosphere to mock Tolkien! “Hobbits are stupid and should be erased from Lord of the Rings because they’re too weak to build things, so obviously they’d have actually all starved to death or something.” Hobbits are way too woke to keep. Sad face. If you think that’s silly, just try this actual […]

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Is Christianity Exploding in Asia? A Critical Thinking Test

Richard Carrier — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:43:12 +0000

If you go looking around you’ll find an endless barrage of Christian media claims that Christianity is exploding in popularity in Asia, and that this proves the power of Christ and the convincing truth of the Christian message. I won’t link to any examples because this mostly shows up on shady propaganda sites that I […]

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On the Strange Idea That Viruses Don’t Exist

Richard Carrier — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 17:00:09 +0000

It’s generally not worth the bother of engaging the anti-vaxx movement. In my personal experience, it is awash with lies, manipulative rhetoric, bad logic, and implausible conspiracy theories (which, as with all implausible conspiracy theories, tend to yellow-brick-road their way to “the Jews”). Even the rubes it has gulled (the “true believers”) are so deeply […]

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A Continuing List of Examples of Alt-Righters Escaping Their Delusions

Richard Carrier — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:30:58 +0000

I am collecting stories of people who escaped secular delusions, like sexism, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, transphobia, or even, just more generally, alt-right, anti-feminist or “anti-SJW’ worldviews. These are the kinds of delusions that trap atheists. And even when their victims are religious, the stories are still often the same, or similar enough that you will […]

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Is Gynocentrism a Thing?

Richard Carrier — Thu, 01 May 2025 01:02:41 +0000

I was hired to critique a popular video in the manosphere, Traditionalism and Feminism, the Great Gynocentrisms of Our Time. It’s 12-years old but still being commented on and at 60,000 views and counting. Its host, Barbarossa (or Barbar), is no longer active online—because, as a black (“Afro-Latino”) man, he was getting uncomfortable with the […]

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Ross Douthat’s Worst Argument for God

Richard Carrier — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 21:00:40 +0000

I’ve written before about the recent decline of Christian apologetics (e.g. Addressing the New Christian Apologetics and Ben Shapiro’s Worst Argument for God and Another Two ‘Best’ Arguments for God?)—a trend that is illustrated by the enthusiastic revival of such antiquated and bumbling arguments as Undesigned Coincidences and Thomism: The Bogus Science. Ross Douthat of […]

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How Not to Be an Idiot: Lessons from Elon Musk

Richard Carrier — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 22:54:57 +0000

Elon Musk is an idiot. He has never accomplished anything by himself in his life and has no remarkable competencies. He could be the most incompetent person on the planet. Like most rich people, he’s just lucky. And Luck Matters More Than Talent. He fell ass-backwards into big money, and our system protects big money. […]

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