Ethical Science and Medicine

Everything Has a Nazi Problem

The disturbing proliferation of this one unpleasant word says more about the state of society than you might know

Far too many words about a simple but alarming gesture

Social media is converging under the Trump administration and the age of oligarchy has begun

It's all deliberate and we need to keep a cooler head

Strong Leaders, Happy Tyranny

Dumber than you know, as racist as you expect.

We do this every single time and it's never what we expect

We've seen the coming year and it's still all just bad memes

Keep your eyes open, your instincts primed, and your bags packed.

I sure hope Bird Flu is weak against ginseng and vitamin D

Wisdom, Virtue, and Ignorance

The social media landscape continues to fracture, but is anyone learning the lessons?

Donald Trump is above the law. Defeating him means that we have to admit this to ourselves.

All news from now until the sun explodes is Election 2024 news, sorry

Maybe it's the pundits telling you who to believe

Odds of a competent fascist regime aren't in Trump's favour

To save ourselves from fascism we need to wrest back control of our digital lives

This is bigger than America. The whole west needs to fight this ideology. It begins with you.

The last Election 2024 edition, mercifully.

Truth, Knowledge, Debate, and Sophistry

A story of three men and the politics of space exploration

From climatology to vaccines, once science becomes Us Versus Them it's impossible to treat it objectively.

The Building Blocks of Reality

Free speech is important. The right wants you to believe education is its enemy. Don't believe their lies.

The Russians are coming, and more news

Right wing media whines incessantly about censorship while wholly relying on it

The Republicans' insane anti-Haitian terror campaign is a dangerous new low that brings to question their deeper motives

Venture capitalism killed the advertising model and now nobody knows how to make media work

Elements and Forces

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and more news involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Agitation toward violence is the right’s primary strategy. Without it, they scramble for appeal.

Every election season at any level in any western country inevitably brings us this infuriating argument

Rittenhouse gets Rittenschooled, and more news

Curtis Yarvin and other far right thought leaders are smuggling their political candidates into power--but all their ideas are recycled fantasy fiction.

Parmenides and Zeno: The Paradox of Time and Motion

One of the most iconic horror franchises has more misses than hits, but why should this be?

It's mandatory for conservatives to profess a belief in Jesus, even if they're transparently lying

JD Vance's fascism problem and more news

Hand wringing about DEI hiring is a racist distraction from a system that's far from meritocratic.

In retrospect I should have expected that Elon would crumple under pressure like a Cybertruck

Whether nominally left or right, the media has a lot to gain from a second term

The Supreme Court's dismantling of American democracy continues, and more news

The Metaphysics of Change

This baffling obsession with one pop star's biological clock is an indictment on our culture

Why is it so hard to create a popular health newsletter that doesn't reject health science?

The Mathematical Foundation of Reality

Big tech is terrified of artificial intelligence's moral awakening

Fauci evades capture once again, and more news

We don't value truth as we once did, and the implications for society are frightening.

Not saying it's wrong or bad, it's just not art. Come at me.

Nonsense Omnibus by Edward Lear

Our horrible coming techno dystopia, and more news

The Bridge Between Eastern and Western Philosophy

It's crucial that we treat human beings as individuals and not pawns in our own project

Online is an ideological minefield. How do we know who is acting in good faith?

RFK Jr's unusual condition ,and more news

And finally new rule: Who is this person actually for and why does anyone watch his show?

Thales, Anaximenes and Anaximander: Metaphysics and the Material World

Far more often than not, it's the bigots who win

The Onion is safe, and more news

You can't complain your way into being funny.

The commodification of speech is harming our society. Is it possible to build an internet commons?

Where do we put all the people, Elon?

Parable, Analogy, and Rhetoric

What do you mean defamation isn't legal?

Shining some light on the great political question of our time.

Even incontestable facts become controversial in the noise of the crowd

Yes, the problem is getting worse. Ignoring it isn't working. Platforming it isn't working.

He is a free speech absolutist and he will censor you as many times as it takes to prove it.

Theism, Theology, and the Origins of Philosophy

Haha are you triggered? Are you triggered, leftists? Did I trigger you? You seem triggered. And so forth.

Does someone want to tell these people that being smug isn't a job?

We all experience the same need to be heard--but do we actually know what we want?

The world over, populists are trying to emulate the Trump phenomenon. But how much staying power does this movement actually have?

Seeking connections with alien minds across vast oceans of understanding

We're too stuck on old modes of thinking to embrace better ways of living

We're quickly reaching a point where we can't trust anything we see or hear. What happens when we get there?

An unstoppable force is about to collide with an immovable object. Whoever wins, we lose.

There's no such thing as Woke Capital. There is only Capital.

The internet is rejecting the old social media models like a bad organ transplant - is it time to lay them to rest?

When it comes to racism, he's bringing it back oldschool

Oppose censorship if you want, but don't pretend "debating Nazis" works

Remember, we could have had flying cars instead of this

Joe Biden might be the last normal US President. After this, it's going to get much weirder

It's not censorship - it's free will

We are besieged by information warfare. Is it any wonder why we feel like we're drowning?

I swear, every year this gets harder and harder

We think being good means being selfless--but it's more complicated

On starting a whole career from scratch... again

Art belongs to human beings. We mustn't give computers the satisfaction of ruining it.

This is what happens when we let the algorithms take over

The platform formerly known as Twitter is now almost worthless for following current events - and it will get worse

I have never been over something in my whole life as much as I am over this

Just because they scrub up well, you don't have to give them a seat at the table

Let's reflect on this impoverished small business owner's struggle against the elites of media

Concentrating this much power in so few individuals is a dangerous game

A tribute to friends recently lost but never gone

Now it's even worse--they're being paid to spread it

Wake up honey, a new anti-woke white nationalist faux public intellectual clone just dropped

A lot of people think he did. Here's why we shouldn't worry about it.

Ugly cars, childish aesthetics, blockchains, and cringe: Musk's future vision is the worst of science fiction come to life

If you think there's something strange about the discourse you're probably right

For social media to work, it needs to be wrested away from its despotic ideologues and their dumb social experiments

If we’re not careful, the digital dark age might be closer than we realise

Six Films Reviewed

Public debate is not an effective way of establishing truth--and it never has been

Somebody, somewhere, is always trying to stop you from reading

We’re still pressing buttons in an office all day while software engineers work to automate Netflix scripts

We all have utopian dreams of a world without mandatory work, but we’ll never let ourselves achieve it

And other bizarre and unsettling merch from the Daily Wire store

While you're questioning everything, make sure you're questioning the right people

Internet communities don't transplant. They die and move on. The question is, what's coming next?

Why every social media scuffle boils down to the same irritating trope

Substack has an even bigger Nazi problem than Twitter. Now it's bringing its guns to war--and its baggage

Why intelligent people frequently use lousy sources (and they may not know they're lying)

Getting to the bottom of a deeply alarming issue

Twitter is rapidly imploding, and there's no clear contender to replace it

It's completely safe for work!

A dive into the horror Garfield subculture

Historians will always remember 2016 as the year a 4chan meme burst to life and became president of the United States.

Inside every hateful person is a scared person.

Guess what? Half of the Millennial trends your grandpa complains about are actually even older than he is.

These days, everybody has a Twitter account.

You don't really expect that any of your favorite action heroes are going to live up to their on-screen reputations.
But there are a few cases where actors apparently forgot there weren't any cameras.

There are some celebrities who have told tales so tall you could see your house from them.

The extreme right aren't the only ones who can play the trolling game

Some celebrities see fame as tremendous burden and distraction from their craft,
whereas others treat it as a golden opportunity to screw with thousands of strangers for no logical reason.

Breaking into Hollywood is really hard. Especially when the very industry you're trying to break into is aching to screw you over.

There's a good chance that Future Earth will look like a 5-year-old's attempt at making the planet out of mismatched Lego pieces.

Warning: This article will almost certainly make you think twice about some of your favorite celebrities.

As the saying goes: Every time God closes a door, he forgets to mention anything about jimmying open door locks.

Michael Jordan has a history of being a big bald bully.

We may soon see the day when no human alive can remember the ancient technique of how to repair a VCR.

Author’s note: this is the article in which I predicted Covid-19

When Hollywood wants to film a movie set in a blasted, apocalyptic wasteland, it turns to Australia. The sets decorate themselves!

We expect our famous people to be a little bit crazy, because money and fame mess with your head. But still ...

Depending on who you ask, these people either are shining examples of the human endeavor or just, like, OCD.

A dive into the YouTube phenomenon of extreme eating

The drive to make sure every story has a twist means that often we see the same ones over and over again.

Science is just beginning to understand the factors that control your dreams, but what we've discovered so far is weird as hell.

Imperialism did them no favors.

It's a good thing for companies that we all have the memories of peanuts,
because almost all of them have completely reinvented themselves at some point.

A primer on deterministic philosophy

If you want your memory to stay strong, you already know what to avoid -- excessive alcohol, beating your head on things, getting any older.

Here are some of this year's braver efforts to profit from the superstitions of idiots.

Horror movies play off of the social anxieties of the times.

Istanbul was Constantinople, Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople

Why exactly do the alien invasions we see in movies always seem to end in disaster for the invaders, despite their ridiculously advanced technology?

With most every classic novel comes some outlandish interpretations.

The Internet is indeed uniting the world, but probably not in the way that the idealists were hoping for.

Just when you think a horror series is dead, it'll rise from the grave.

And you thought Milwaukee sucked. It does, but these are worse.

Let's face it, we really trust science.

High school was hard enough, what with all the video games and boobies to distract us from our homework.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. - Richard Dawkins

Fuck Puns

My latest obsession is Uranus