2 June 2025
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....
24 September 2022
Last month I began a three-part series with A Bayesian Analysis of Susannah Rees’s Ishtar-in-the-Manosphere Thesis and A Bayesian Analysis of Kate Loveman’s Pepys Diary Thesis. Today I will conclude with the third random selection from my test set: LaDale C....
29 April 2022
“But why exactly do we believe that human life should be valued?” Justin Brierley asks (p. 52). Nowhere in his quest for an answer does he ever resort to asking experts in moral psychology or sociology what science has found the answer to this question...
11 February 2022
After reviewing the new 2020 PhilPapers Survey, I can say none of my views have changed; while philosophy as a field has slowly crept more toward my views than not (see my previous article, The New 2020 PhilPapers Survey, which also covers my thoughts on some of the...
27 November 2021
You might have noticed a shift over the past few years in how I address apologists, propagandists, kooks, and various disinformation scoundrels, toward laying out not just that they are wrong (their facts are bogus; their logic is hosed), but the underlying...
24 April 2021
Dawkins is spewing irrational, uninformed bigotry-fuel on Twitter again. I don’t think deliberately; he’s just a clueless fool. But the effect is the same. He even unknowingly chose the tired old bigot’s tactic of Just Asking Questions, in precisely...
14 March 2021
It’s not common that major, respected academic journals exhibit a catastrophic failure in their peer review process. But it happens. Everything from creationist dribble to just about anything in any field has “slipped past” peer review protocols in...
28 June 2020
People denying racism is a systemic problem in American policing repeatedly cite as “proof” a study published by Roland Fryer, which they particularly love citing because Fryer is black. The thing is though, Fryer’s study proved systemic racism in...
30 August 2019
In aid and honor of my one-month online Critical Thinking Course that starts this weekend (Register Now!), I want to introduce you to a rhetorical (or indeed psychological) tactic that is found everywhere but you probably didn’t know someone had a name for it. I...
3 March 2019
There is no such thing as a “No Go Zone” in any Western country. And this is a conspiracy theory that needs to stop in the so-called Skeptic Community. Skeptics are supposed to know better than to fall for specious abuses of evidence and fallacious...
3 March 2017
Adam Ruins Everything is a fantastic YouTube series. Short videos, usually pretty much spot on, that destroy cultural assumptions by…well, just demonstrating they are only cultural assumptions—and indeed, often created for sinister or stupid reasons, and...
11 December 2015
Here are some things I learned when I posted on Facebook an article about the rising abuse of innocent Muslims in America for no valid reason but an irrational fear of Islam. Trigger warning: a fuckton of awful racist shit follows (or equivalent). First, The Set-Up I...
3 December 2015
Jerry Coyne. Peter Boghossian. Richard Dawkins. Various others. I call them the Dudebros because they act like white privilege is awesome, pontificate infallibly like the Pope, and don’t understand any of the things they complain about. They are the Archie...
19 August 2015
I’ve been too busy to blog about all the things I wanted to this month. From the Black Lives Matter protest to the Ophelia Benson departure to a weird John Loftus flameout currently going on. So here I’m quickly trying to catch up. First on deck: the BLM...
14 July 2015
Brayton and Gaudette produced a really excellent video smartly summarizing the statistical facts about racism in America and why humanists should care about this and make even more effort to do something about it. Check it out on YouTube. And if you like that,...
30 June 2015
Narrator’s voice to be heard as in the style of an old timey radio narrator… LYRICAL CHORUS: O-l-d T-i-m-e-y R-a-d-i-o!!! NARRATOR: We bring you back to the amazing adventures of The Amazing Whitey Spidey Man! The scene opens when another Dick Driver, a...