I'm a philosophy professor at the University of Lethbridge in Southern Alberta, Canada. I specialize in philosophy of war, game theory, contractarianism, and theodicy (the Problem of Evil). I am bald, fat, and ugly, but my wife loves me, so I don't care.
In one my first entries in this blog, “First to the Tribe”, posted on September 14, 2016, I noted – not as a criticism but as a simple observation – that none of us can afford to do all of… Read More ›
In the wake of the events that took place at the U.S. Capitol building yesterday, things could have gone one of two ways. The Awfulisers worried that Trump would ‘double down’, perhaps even invoking martial law. So, they added, if… Read More ›
Is it still English if the accent is on the wrong syllable? I want to argue that it’s not. Rebel is a noun. To rebel is a verb. “The rebels opted to rebel.” is English. “The rebels opted to rebel.”… Read More ›
Heaven forfend that books should offend. So I knew that publishers have taken to hiring sensitivity readers. What I didn’t know, but should have guessed, is just how sensitive these sensitivity readers take readers to be. I could regale you… Read More ›
There are five times as many inordinately tall white men as black men in America, and yet there are three times as many blacks in the NBA as whites. Why isn’t this a slam-dunk proof that there’s discrimination against white… Read More ›
Last Saturday Donald Trump spent an hour on the phone trying to inveigle the Attorney General of Georgia to ‘find’ him enough votes to overturn the results of the election, in the wake of which some pundits are speculating on… Read More ›
On the one hand it’s perfectly understandable that law enforcement might not want to give the miscreant the opportunity to flush the evidence before it can be found, or to arm himself so he can go down fighting. But on… Read More ›
It’s a matter of straightforward induction that Great Danes are typically taller than Chihuahuas. So why would it be odd to say that they’re stereotypically taller? Because in normal parlance a stereotype only applies to people. Then why would it… Read More ›
The role model argument for affirmative action hiring cannot be dismissed out of hand. There may, however, be a few less-than-welcome autonomous consequences to consider. For one thing, affirmative action hiring is very likely to be sub-optimal by measures other… Read More ›
Picking cotton in leg-irons is very slow work. So instead – and with very few exceptions – slaves are held in their servitude not by leg-irons but by there being nowhere else to go, and there being no access to… Read More ›
