The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world (Intelligence^2) is a debate between Archbishop Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe (for the Church) and Christoper Hitchens and Stephen Fry (against the Church). The link has all of the videos linked in from YouTube[1] and it’s worth watching all of it, especially since the audience gets to vote twice: once at the beginning and once at the end.[2]

It is interesting not because those supporting the Church actually argued well, but because those against the church did.... [More]

Spirit (XKCD) anthropomorphizes the Mars lander that was meant to operate for 90 days and has now been in operation instead for 2274 Mars days. Because it has been unable to unstick itself from an impediment since May of 2009, it has been deemed a “stationary research station”. The winds and sand will eventually corrode its solar panels to such a degree that it will lose contact with NASA.

The cartoon evokes a feeling of pity for the robot because we are convinced that it thinks and feels—like us.... [More]

The first decade of the twenty-first century brought with it much that is bad—global economic crash, increased American colonialism, increasingly harsh climate—but what is less-often mentioned is a feature primarily of American society that was quite aggravated throughout: Anti-intellectualism. Anyone who knows anything or bothers to educate themselves before opening up their big yap is often dismissed as a tool, a nerd, a bore. Instead, ample room was made in many a debate for anyone who... [More]

To egregiously paraphrase the Pascal quote cited later:

“A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

There is all too much substantiating evidence for this adage these days, especially if one spends too much time wallowing in what is often designated the MSM or [M]ain[S]tream [M]edia. Learning a little about something and beating everyone over the head with it is nothing new. Nor is the phenomenon wherein those who know the least make the most noise. It is very likely that things have... [More]

Modern discussions of law are very frequently mired down in discussions of minutiae of what is legal vs. what is moral. Very quickly, the discussion has narrowed further to niggling over minor quirks of American jurisprudence and precedence law.

For example, it seems that the relatively narrow topic of torture has become an almost impossibly unwieldy and unknowable problem for this modern age’s great thinkers, where hours and hours and hours are spent determining at what point a particular... [More]