Joel's humanistic blog

The next two Sundays, Equal Time for Freethought's Barry F. Seidman and Neil J. Murphy will be interviewing one of the show's most famous guests ever: the one and only Noam Chomsky! The show is partially inspired by The Humanist magazine 's publishing an interview with Chomsky earlier this year; where as one would expect, he addressed his take on humanism in addition to his usual political topics. In this interview, Chomsky deals with a range of subjects, from humanism, the role of religion in politics, the free will question, human nature, to politics and economics. A few weeks ago, I helped the producers draft some of their interview questions. Now, I've just finished listening to the unedited version of the prerecorded interview, and I'm really happy at how it turned out. There's definitely areas where one can disagree with Chomsky: for instance, all of the ETFF crew take a much harder determinist position on the free will question than Chomsky, and his...

Science fiction critic/editor/fan John J. Pierce is at it again. For the second time this year, he's gotten a letter to the editor about science fiction published in The New York Times . Last January, as previously seen on this blog , he weighed in on Heinlein's ever-controversial Starship Troopers . Today, the NYT printed his response to a snooty article on Philip K. Dick. The article was one of many that take the "science fiction for people who hate to admit that worthwhile literature is science fiction" tack: take a single science fiction author (Bradbury, le Guin and Vonnegut are common examples) and proceed to argue that the author has some special talent that is completely different from the bulk of science fiction authors, and that their literary value is mutually exclusive to the science fictional aspects of their work. So, this article will note Dick's origins in pulps and Ace Double paperbacks, and then follow it up with "you don't read M...