An Anatomy of Contemporary Right-Wing Delusions

I recently analyzed for a client the crazy rant of Chilean conservative thinktanker Axel Kaiser in “This Could End in Civil War” and realized this is a paradigmatic model of all contemporary right-wing delusionality and I should blog it. I covered a different...

Is Society Going to Collapse in 20 Years?

There is much discussion of late (typically gullible) of a recent article claiming that a 1972 prediction of the collapse of civilization between 2040 and 2070 from “MIT” is “on track.” This is scam logic that needs to be called...

Three Common Tactics of Cranks, Liars, and Trolls

You might have noticed a shift over the past few years in how I address apologists, propagandists, kooks, and various disinformation scoundrels, toward laying out not just that they are wrong (their facts are bogus; their logic is hosed), but the underlying...

Epistemology Test: Anthony Fauci Edition

Your epistemology might be broken. Here is one test to find out. And if that’s what you find, you need to repair that broken epistemology; and I have some tips here on how to do that. But the broader skills you need to master for a reliable epistemology I have...

UFOs Are Not That Remarkable

Sometime toward the end of this month the military will release a report on UFOs; unless an extension is granted, but even if one is—I’m sure it’s time-consuming work—I expect the report will be delivered before end of year. Some of it, I...

Help Us Get Critical about Critical Thinking This Month!

Jim Hall of the Atheist Edge show will be taking my class this month (starting today, but you can register and jump in anytime this first week) with an aim to test and review it, and maybe challenge it and assess how it could be improved. He’d love more students...

No, Christianity Was Not Invented in the 4th Century

And yes. We know that for a fact. Like QAnon, which is a new secular religion spreading, quite bizarrely, across the globe, I have noticed another strange conspiracy theory gaining popularity and spreading worldwide: the belief that Christianity was invented in the...

A Vital Primer on Media Literacy

I am getting asked the same question far too much lately: “What is your take on [x]; it seems pretty convincing; how do we know it’s not reliable?” Where [x] will be some crank on the internet, some ridiculous news headline, some random article...

Why Syllogisms Usually Suck: Free Will Edition

In my experience, maybe 90% of the time when someone says they can prove something true with a logical syllogism, the syllogism they present is hopelessly fallacious. There seems to be a ubiquitous failure mode caused by a popular belief that syllogisms can prove...

Galileo’s Goofs: Lessons We Can Learn from Failure

I’ve written before about the importance and methodology of thought experiments, and how they are often screwed up even by professional philosophers (see On Hosing Thought Experiments). Today I’m going to pull a page out of the history of science to...

Formalized Gullibility as a Modern Christian Methodology

In my debate with Craig Evans, one of the strange arguments he attempted was the Argument from Verisimilitude, whereby he says we should believe any story that’s dressed up in a realistic background. In my original Analysis of the Carrier-Evans Debate, I...

Shaun Skills: How to Learn from Exemplary Cases

Shaun is a YouTube critic who composes a lot of excellent videos critiquing various other YouTube content, from social commentators to entertainment media. He does a good job of summarizing, fact-checking, logic-vetting, and illustrating his finds in the video medium....