Thinking Out Aloud

Christopher I. Beckwith ’s Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present in a history of centr...

This expands a comment I made here . Skepticlawyer herself kindly looked over it, so I have incorporated her longer comments (slightly edit...

We have been having some trouble with attacks on Indians here in Australia, and particularly in Victoria. It is hard to sort our what is r...

Sometimes, the best way to appreciate your own country—your own time and place—is from someone who has no reason to take it for granted beca...

The following are some excerpts from a piece I drafted, intended for publication. Folk may find them helpful. Depression—which has been writ...

I just wanted to make that clear. They are clearly torture as defined by the Torture Convention which lots of countries (including Oz and t...

In early 2001 and early 2002 I visited New Zealand for the Sounds of Summer symposium, travelling with Daffyd . On both occasions, we met u...

Jim Franklin ’s What Science Knows: And How It Knows It is a wonderfully lucid explication of science and the philosophy of science. Philos...

A recent paper establishing that there was no scientific consensus behind the “global cooling” scare of the 1970s says something much more ...

This is the second part of a two part consideration of a published essay Law, Morality, and "Sexual Orientation" (pdf) by John Fi...