Secular Café Archive

Here's a good Guardian article I found recently: If leftwingers like me are condemned as rightwing, then what’s left? by Tim Lott He captures essentially my thoughts about various left-wing "social justice" movements in social media and elsewhere. Personally, I'm a left-of-centre moderate ...

I'm back playing the Fall from Heaven 2 Civ4 mod once again. I finally got it to work. I'm quite enjoying it. :) I'm playing a huge map with 18 AI opponents (a few have since been destroyed). Right at the start, I was surrounded by goblin marauders. I've since expanded to three towns and beaten most...

Anyone else into games like this? I'm currently into Civilization 5 and sometimes I go retro and play Civilization 3. I actually find Civ 3 more fun sometimes, because the AI civs are often more unpredictable. The AI civs in Civ 5 are often way too peaceful too and rarely attack me. http://upload.wi...

Nowadays, there's a movement (often supported by students) to impose speech codes, coercion and censorship in universities to create so-called "safe spaces". When I was an undergrad in the 90's, I remember that there was a very similar movement to push political correctness in academic cul...

Also, are Higgs bosons somehow related to dark matter?

Cool, can we make warp drive starships with 'em?

At some point, I'll get around reading the "The Blank Slate". I'm interested in the nature/nurture debate and how ideology plays a role.

[quote=""kennyc""]I used to play all the time, but now with the kids out of the house, not so much....maybe I should try and find a "board game group" here in town or something.... Hmmm...[/quote] You're in luck! :) http://www.meetup.com/The-Denver-Boardgames-Meetup-Gro...

Here's a goodie, if it hasn't been posted already:

Any boardgame players here? What are your preferences? Here are mine: Complex, geeky, fantasy or strategic based games: Talisman : This is probably my favourite one. I have all of the expansion sets. Easy learning curve but has a great deal of complexity. While there's a great deal of randomness and...

Reminds me of this NYT article on troll subculture:

Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling

I had a chance to watch this 2005 Swedish documentary by Evin Rubar (with subtitles translated into English). The documentary highlights a range of really bizarre and scary stuff. What would be considered cult-like, fringe or crazy in other western countries, became mainstream and influentially powe...

I'd like to welcome rezling to SC! :) I met rezling from the Edmonton Skepticon conference last year. She has a quite a background story, if she's willing to tell, regarding her intellectual journey. Anyways, I hope that you like it here. :) It's smaller than the Ratskep board, but it's small enough...

Welcome, CatLady. I visited Australia last year and took a 3-week tour from Perth to Darwin. See here for photos I put up.

These ones from Slowpoke are pretty spot on:

[quote=""sohy""] Radical feminists, on the other hand, completely reject that point of view (i.e. instead they believe in a “Blank Slate” view of human nature) and want to see gender in society eliminated. I'm guessing that you never read that book because Pinker totally debunks ...

Just to clarify, I’m suspecting that most liberal feminists would tend to choose “somewhere between nature and nurture.” They’re not averse to the idea that differences in interests, hobbies, career choices, norms, ways of thinking and perceiving, children’s toy preferences, and other behavioural an...

I know that SC may not likely be representative of atheists and skeptics in general, but I just wanted to get an idea of how much sway gender identity beliefs and politics have influenced people. Overall, I'm sensing that there's a strong and divisive rift among skeptics regarding feminist viewpoint...

Here's another from Mark Fiore.

Corporateland!

[quote=""kennyc""]Thank you! This is exactly the issue with the world (first world) today![/quote]

You're welcome! Here's a political cartoon with a similar theme:

I thought this was interesting cartoon. If anyone is familiar with the documentary The Corporation, you may find some familiar themes. That Citizens United case in the US Supreme Court really opened the floodgates to transition the US towards a Gilded Age plutocracy as opposed to a democratic republ...

Due to no further participation, the formal discussion is now complete. Cnorman18 and Columbus may post here now if they wish to.

Due to no further posting, I'm concluding this debate. Thank you cnorman18 and Columbus for your participation.

Looks like we have mostly everything. We just need a proposed start date to launch the debate thread (the deadline for the first statements would be one week after this start date).

Hi BWE/Stealthsparx, Just to be clear, would you like to have it so that your statements appear simultaneously each round, rather than appear in sequence? (the formal debate forum is fully moderated, so that will make it possible). Also, I think it's best to have time limits based on a duration (e.g...