I’d logged onto Twitter for my daily briefing, and was now having to justify my existence to a girl called Chelsea who was tweeting angrily at me for being born in…View Post | Continue reading
I. Resolving the Academic Problem I have been teaching philosophy in higher education for almost six years now and my disillusionment with academia in general—and academic philosophy in particular—has been…View Post | Continue reading
In her 2017 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Beatrice Fihn acknowledged the insane situation we find ourselves in due to the widespread militaristic harnessing of the atom: The risk for…View Post | Continue reading
Michael Shellenberger’s recent book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All has received enormous media attention in the relevant circles. There has been much dispute over the book’s factual…View Post | Continue reading
What if the Earth isn’t the centre of everything? What if the ancestors of humans once looked like monkeys, or were single-celled organisms? What if the continents move? These questions…View Post | Continue reading
Left-wing liberals who are opposed to the identity politics developments on the left increasingly find ourselves accused of being right wing, referred to as “right wing” and scornfully urged to…View Post | Continue reading
In 2017, I presented a paper at the Florida Academy of Sciences entitled “The Importance of Being a Mammal.” Its thesis was threefold. First, a number of behaviours appear to…View Post | Continue reading
In September 2020, President Trump caused a stir by announcing a 1776 Commission to “restore patriotic education” to US schools. The idea of the national government writing history in such…View Post | Continue reading
The first rule of behavioural genetics is that every trait is heritable. What makes us different is only about 1 per cent of our entire genetic code. Ninety-nine per cent codes for things like brai… | Continue reading
To insist that defenders of freedom of speech must listen to you is to misunderstand the concepts of freedom and the marketplace of ideas. | Continue reading
Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself. That may sound like a bold or even hyperbolic claim, but the reality is that the cluster of ideas and values a… | Continue reading
It was bound to happen. As Mark Twain writes in “Corn Pone Opinions,” our self-approval is “acquired mainly from the approval of other people.” Our ideas don’t come from “thinking and examination,”… | Continue reading
Part 1 of this essay outlined six major threats to free speech at university, focusing on institutions in the UK and US: first, speech codes, speech guidelines and free speech zones; second, no-pla… | Continue reading
It has become popular lately to call for the breakup of so-called Big Tech. Such calls have come from Senator and Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, the Hous… | Continue reading
Colleges and universities across the English-speaking world are caught up in the enthusiasm of a Great Awokening. Its dogmas are structural violence, systemic racism, racial stress, white privilege… | Continue reading
Cultural Studies in the Military My fifteen-year career in the military seemed to last an eternity. At twenty years old, I found myself involved in the initial push into Iraq with the 82nd Airborne… | Continue reading
Our current age is defined by the internet. The internet—a technology that allows the decentralized, globalized dissemination of information—has become so thoroughly entrenched in human life that a… | Continue reading
In 2001, a group of technologists and software developers with unconventional theories about how software development ought to be managed met at Snowbird ski resort to try to commit some of those c… | Continue reading
Increasingly, we are seeing insistences that Social Justice has become a new religion. The purpose of this essay is to explore this topic in some depth. Because this essay is inordinately long—beca… | Continue reading
There is more in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in any human philosophy. This is why science is not philosophy. Those who map the skies, observe the patterns of a school of fish or dissect … | Continue reading
Introduction Although physicists tend to fall on the liberal side of the political spectrum, at a professional level it’s generally accepted that science unites us and personal politics should be r… | Continue reading
This essay, although hopefully accessible to everyone, is the most thorough breakdown of the study and written for those who are already somewhat familiar with the problems of ideologically-motivat… | Continue reading
The other day a friend linked me to a tweet from one journalist to another: “i think you want to be really careful,” it said, “about using language that sounds like you might be [… | Continue reading