Jena Snyder, another On Spec alumnus, posted a minority opinion following my last rant. This is not the first time she and I have disagreed; there have been sparks and brush fires over the years, and we have not always liked each other. We continue to see eye-to-elbow on some things (certain traits of the [...]
Regular visitors to this site may remember that for a number of years now, I’ve been one of the fiction editors at the Canadian SF magazine On Spec. They first approached me back in 1999; I’ve served pretty much continuously since, except for a brief hiatus back in 2001 when I felt that the fear [...]
Yeah, I kind of thought that might get your attention. Don’t worry, it’s not what you’re thinking. Nothing exists in isolation; every object stands in contrast to its background, every thing is relative to everything else. So when I take a stand in defense of an admittedly pernicious, powerful, and downright idiotic cult, you knows [...]
I know I haven’t mentioned it lately, but the world is still turning to shit. The Bush administration recently gave the US Navy the go-ahead to kill as many whales as they want to in their hunt for tewwowists in diesel-powered submarines, and screw the California Supreme Court. It’s finally been officially admitted that nobody’s [...]
Previously, on No Moods, Ads, or Cutesy Fucking Icons… Many religious people are idiots. My Dad’s religious, but he’s no idiot. There are some other smart religious people out there too. Maybe they’re right and I’m wrong. But they can’t be, because I’m a scientist and they’re not! But real scientists have to allow for [...]
It should be no secret that I am one of that ever-growing flock of empiricists who’ve been touched by His Noodly Appendage*. And while I generally have little patience for religious beliefs of any stripe — I just can’t see any explanatory utility in them at all — my feelings about religious believers are somewhat [...]
Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? Too bad it’s pretty much the way we do things in this hemisphere. Here in Ontario, we face the imminent prospect of double-barreled elections: one provincial, one federal. The leader of our provincial Conservative Party recently allowed that his plan to publicly fund religious schools would include taxpayer support of those [...]
Now and then I’ve fielded questions — in interviews, private e-mails, maybe even here in the ‘crawl — about my reductionist take on human nature. In particular, a lot of folks are not comfy with my dissing of altruism, which (if it ever does arise in a population) is likely to get weeded out real [...]
How many times have you heard new parents, their eyes bright with happy delerium (or perhaps just lack of sleep), insisting that you don’t know what love is until you first lay eyes on your baby? How many of you have reunited with old university buddies who have grown up and spawned, only to find [...]
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