Some find Tacitus’ Annals tedious. Some of it is. But his work keeps me riveted. I’m not so interested in history, per se. Rather I’m interested in identifying patterns of human behaviour, events that repeat over millennia, and asking why… Read More ›
social
The Lesser Known Logical Fallacies.
If you’ve ever taken a logic and critical thinking course, you’ll have learned about logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are patterns of bad reasoning that occur so often they’re given their own special names. Ad hominem arguments are directed at the… Read More ›
Saturday Morning Pam-toons. End of the Clapham Line. Guest artist Mackenzie Knight. (Repost Sept. 2020)
The Man on the Clapham Omnibus The ‘Man on the Clapham Omnibus’ is an hypothetical reasonable, ordinary person used in English law courts as a standard to judge the actions of real people in given situations — particularly to determine… Read More ›
About Saturday Morning Pam-Toons
Tune in to pam-mentations.com every Saturday at 10 a.m. MT for the latest Pam-toon. Pam-toons provide a quirky commentary on philosophical and social & political issues.
Thoughlets. xxxv.
People who hate each other can and do manage to live together peaceably. Brewing neighbours walk past each other for thirty years. Colleagues just accept that each other are idiots. Most misogynists are not raping and shooting women. And a… Read More ›
Thoughtlets. xxx.
What some forget is that, like it or not, the military is social. It’s embedded in a polity, and it’s just one of many familiar social and political institutions therein. There exists no impenetrable wall with soldiers on one side… Read More ›
Bread and Circuses
(Oct. 24, 2020) Somewhere around the second century CE, the Roman satirist Juvenal coined the phrase ‘bread and circuses’ which has come to mean placating one’s populace with cheap bribes to distract them from their political grievances. Here’s the logic…. Read More ›
Saturday Morning Pam-toons. “Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by my words?” Thomas Hobbes.
It may seem strange to some man that has not well weighed these things that nature should thus dissociate and render men apt to invade and destroy one another; and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from… Read More ›
