Trigger warning: Stalking, graphic death and rape threats, doxxing, threats of swatting, impersonation

I’ve been putting off writing this for a while now, because it involves dredging deep into some incredibly ugly stuff.

Most of you know that I’ve been stalked for years by a stalker (or stalkers) who has created fake social media profiles in my ( Read more... )

This is an essay about cultural appropriation, except that it’s not really an essay about cultural appropriation.

This is actually about the way genuine, complex problems in complex societies get reduced to nattering virtue-signaling nonsense that become used as blunt instruments to ensure conformity and serve as tribalistic us-vs-them markers, in ( Read more... )

[This essay is an expansion of a thought I originally wrote as an answer on Quora]

There is a notion, a myth enshrined in a great deal of Western philosophy, that as time goes on, societies move ever further from superstition and ignorance, and ever closer to Truth.

It is, like many social myths, complete nonsense.

In fact, societies swing to and ( Read more... )

[Note: This entry started out as an answer on Quora]

A lot of my liberal friends seem baffled by the fact that 45’s supporters seem...remarkably unfazed by the fact that Trump keeps announcing he’ll do things he never gets round to doing. Like, for example, when he said he’d post overwhelming evidence of his innocence and a vast conspiracy at a ( Read more... )

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“The street finds its own uses for things.”
         -William Gibson, Burning Chrome

Last year, my wife, my co-author, and I launched a new podcast, The Skeptical Pervert. We talk about sex...and more specifically, we talk about sex through a lens of empiricism and rationality.


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The contradictions and inconsistencies are a feature, not a bug


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