Funny way to start, but there’s method to my madness. “Mommy, why is it raining?” Because God’s crying. “Why is God crying?” Because He’s sad. “Why is God sad?” It must be something you did. Well that, at any rate,… Read More ›
Everything You Wanted to Know About What’s Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask
THERE’S AN EXPLANATION FOR EVERYTHING
Most people lose track of their ancestors after a couple generations. I haven’t. My family archives go back to when we came down from the trees, about a half a kilometre from the upper Nile. Some Arab supremacists like to… Read More ›
MARTIN LUTHER KING’S SEXUAL FANTASY
It used to be the most important thing about you was your race. Martin Luther King dreamt of the day his children would be judged by the quality of their character rather than the colour of their skin. What he… Read More ›
THE LIBERAL CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM
There’s a pattern to public misperception. Arrangements that are very local are often taken to be universal, and those that are quite recent are taken to have always been. A case in point – I won’t say an obvious case… Read More ›
FUN WITH QUANTIFIERS
Syntactically, Black Lives Matter is a complete sentence in English, but it’s only (what Rudolf Carnap has called) a pseudo-sentence. It’s not a real sentence because mattering is a two-place relation. If something is to matter, it has to matter… Read More ›
WHY PHILOSOPHY MATTERS
When people say, “The time has come to …”, what they’re implying is that until now it hadn’t. Come, that is. So apparently sexual violence was okay until this morning. The rote politician response to a tragedy is, “Our hearts… Read More ›
MY RACIST BONA FIDES
If I’m going to be a racist – and yer damn rights I am! – I want to establish my bona fides. This is going to take some work. So bear with me. To start, full disclosure: Back in the… Read More ›
MY WIFE IS SCARY
My wife is an inveterate researcher. She hears about something and then can’t stop herself from heading head down down the rabbit hole. This morning it was broody hens. Huh? Why? Because she immediately had a suspicion that the phenomenon… Read More ›
UKRAINE AND IRAN
The offensive with which the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, would have ended the matter had the attack not petered out within days. Was it poor planning by the Russian command, or pure brilliance by the… Read More ›
A SMALL VICTORY, BUT A VICTORY NONETHELESS
In 2021, Dr. Frances Widdowson was fired from Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, for rather impolitically criticising the indigenisation of the university. She sued for wrongful dismissal, and five years later she won, though such victories tend to be… Read More ›
