© 2003–2021 by Teed Rockwell I wrote this text during my twenty years teaching Critical Thinking in the California State University system. It is the result of years of honing the text in response to my student’s questions, and to my own increasing understanding of the curious relationship between logic…

And why it must be set in Japan — I recently saw a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s the Mikado renamed Il Ducato and set in Milan instead of Japan. This reminded me of another rewritten version I read about online called the MacAdo , which was set in Scotland. Both of these shows struck me as solution in…

His eyewitness account shows that the movie got it right. — After seeing the Oppenheimer movie, I started rereading my father’s memoir of his time working on the Manhattan Project. It begins with his description of an atomic test that he saw in the early fifties that was twice the size of the Alamogordo test depicted in the movie. …

Reality has many levels — Douglas Giles, PhD says that none of his articles have received as much attention as his article Buddhism is Wrong. A lot of Buddhists , including me, have pointed out in the comments that his interpretation varies dramatically from Buddhism as we know it and practice it. I‘m not 100%…

The argument you are attacking here is based on two false premises, and you do a good job of attacking the first premise i.e. that human society in the past was patriarchal because of the need to hunt. But even if that were true, it doesn't support the inference that…

Sleep with her, trouble ensues. Restrain yourself, Happy Ending. — If you want to have someone take a risk which is stupid and/or morally dangerous, everyone will understand why the hero did it if she is the bait. Most of her movies capitalize on the fact that she seems too luscious to resist, but too good to be true. …

How Social marginalization produces Epistemic Privilege — Privileged Access is a technical term coined by Analytic philosophers of mind in the mid-20th century. It refers to the special relationship that we have with our own mental states. We can both know about my pain, but only I can feel my pain. We can both know about my…

But there are cultural contexts, inhabited by thousands and even millions of people, that believe that (something like) this sort of thing is OK. In Afghanistan, it is considered acceptable for a man to kiss his baby son's penis. Among some Australian Aboriginal tribes, men shake each other's penises as…

Or 4) people who have looked carefully at the controversy and concluded that Rowling is not actually transphobic. I have read most of what she has written on this topic, and I see only two things she believes which make people think she is transphobic 1) she thinks that no…