I'm detecting a double hermeneutic effect here... Oh shit, I'm not a sociologist. Never mind.

Yep. Superstition, prejudice, stereotype, and rumor also fall under the category of "accepted truth" more often than not.

Agreed. The Cold War defined this country's culture for decades, and its end (actually, a complex chain of events) is still sending shockwaves. Definitely one of the biggest gamechangers in modern history. 9/11 is part of something big as well, but only part.

Well, it seems that from the looks of things, online self-publishing may become the new way to get noticed by traditional publishing rather than through the journals and genre magazines of years past. It's good to see that the stigma is going away at least. I think the reason for the prejudice against…

Thank you for this thoughtful comment! You nailed exactly what bothered me about this article. By othering and ridiculing "hipster" racism, it missed an opportunity to show how banal racism is for, I don't know, the reader? Just another way we can blame racism on "those" annoying people we don't like anyway. Also,…

es un articulo; no es un, pronombre, dud ;)

The reason why I advocate philosophy is because I think that philosophy isn't just a collection of old ideas and conjecture, but a compulsive human activity. Paraphrasing Philip K. Dick, everyone needs a working theory to how the world works. Everyone, even physicists, can't help but make some assumptions about…

Thank you for bringing some facts to the discussion.

damn bad spelling. i meant empiricism not imperialism jeez

And thus, the great intellectual shitstorm of modern times continues. The division between science and philosophy is something that I have been painfully aware of for some time. It's so stark, I often wonder if the differences are based on neurological rather than ideological differences. And, by the way,…

Oh, it was targeted at the public at large, but we all know "the public" means everybody else, especially those people deemed unfit to make the right choices, who, from the perspective of organized religion is just about everyone, but especially women and children. (sorry about the run on sentence) I was referring…

This is about those not present actually, the women and children. These men aren't horrified by their own ability to choose to access the "evils" of the internet, but rather the women and children. Their choices must be restricted for their own good.

I was going to say the same.

This house is a side-scroller.

I think the best way to go about this is making it mandatory that each random legislator remain anonymous and correspond electronically. Whenever a vote comes up, you'd be chosen randomly among a pool of other anonymous potential representatives who were also randomly selected from a larger pool of qualified (4 years…

This line of thinking implies that there will always be a new best friend to replace the former. The man who is no longer best friends with the woman after seven years may simply only have casual acquaintances filling that void, if that.

The Anthropic Principle is tautology, and so is intelligent design. This is their common ground.

This statement is verifiably false. [[www.pnas.org]]

Actually this kind of fashion police enforcement was going on even more so during Saddam's reign. Just because he was secular doesn't mean that conformity to social norms was not fully enforced.

um. as in the lower 48 states of the United States of America which do not include Alaska and Hawaii.