Something I have observed: Conservatives often like to call people like me-social democrats, communitarians, people who believe that the job of society is to help us better take care of each other-"naive," as though over my entire life, I hadn't had ample opportunities to watch people treating each other pretty badly, hadn't had ample ( Read more... )

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Dan Wineman explains why the Flash on your retail website needs to go:

Me: (tries to visit a local restaurant’s website via iPhone)
Restaurant website: I require Flash. Fuck off.
Me: I just want to know how late you’re open.
Website: Nope.
Me: But I’m on my phone. Don’t you have a little “HTML Version” link up in the corner or something?
Website: I’m ( Read more... )

Dear Co-workers ( Read more... )

Dear Friend, Colleagues, and Fellow-Travellers,

Can we knock it off with the puerile snickering over People of Wal-Mart, already*? Also with the classist Wal-Mart slang-"Walmart children," "Walmart creatures," etc?

I mean, sure, it's really easy to feel superior to a population of largely poor people, many of whom are fat, many of whom may be on ( Read more... )

Scientific knowledge is based on empirical evidence, and is appropriate for understanding the natural world, but it provides only a limited understanding of the supernatural, aesthetic, or other ways of knowing, such as art, philosophy, or religion.1
Here follows a very short rant. Maybe a rantlet ( Read more... )

I recognize that health emergencies, surgery, and life-saving procedures are very sexy, engaging, and generally fascinating. Tales of citizens of the U.S. who cannot afford chemotherapy or surgery, or who get turned back from emergency rooms rightly set people's blood to boiling.

I wish, though, that discussions of health care, and in particular, ( Read more... )

There's a Tim Horton's almost across the street from my house. This means that at any hour of the day or night, I can look out my kitchen window, across the laneway and the parking lot, and see a police cruiser parked across Danforth. At eight o'clock in the morning, when parents are dropping their kids off at the school across the street, there's ( Read more... )

Dear Michael Coren,

Fuck you you sanctimonious, condescending coward.

Dave said it best:

I can't recall when I've read anything so sexist and so wrong in this century.

Last week a young girl dressed up as a soldier died in the increasingly futile and pointless war in Afghanistan. She was 21 years old, had been in the country for two weeks ( Read more... )

This is a minor rant, left over from my holiday visit to the hospital.

One thing that bugged me when I was at the hospital getting the Dread Infection looked at-one thing that frequently bugs me about medical practitioners, actually-was being treated like a rather clueless n00b in my own body.
( After Three Decades... )