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No, you're not entitled to your opinion

No, you're not entitled to your opinion
Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning. Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. A bit harsh? The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. Firstly, what’s an opinion? Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. Meryl Dorey is the leader of the Australian Vaccination Network, which despite the name is vehemently anti-vaccine. Related:  To Whom It May Concern...

MORE TROLLS THAN A MID-LEVEL DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS CAMPAIGN | chronicles of harriet I have been the victim of trolling. Recently, a person tried to bait me into an argument, or get a rise out of me by insulting my latest book release, A Single Link, without reading it. When that didn’t work, they said they were purchasing another book that released the same day as A Single Link. Fine by me; my short story, Brood is in that book, too. Silly rabbit. No, not rabbit…troll. In Internet slang, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a group forum, chat room, or blog. While trolling – the term for the discordant actions of a troll – can be accidental, it is usually done with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion. Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment and bullying. In Icelandic, þurs refers to trolls. Like this:

La selección finalista del concurso Sony World Photography Awards de 2018 绽放' © Lin Chen, China, Commended, Open, Travel (Open competition), 2018 Sony World Photography Awards. Los fotógrafos profesionales son juzgados por una serie de imágenes, mientras que en la categoría Open concursan fotógrafos aficionados que envían una sola imagen para su consideración. Organizado por la World Photography Organisation y trás revelar lo más destacado inicialmente hace unos meses, el concurso ha anunciado su lista corta (las diez mejores imágenes por categoría) y la lista recomendada (las 50 mejores imágenes por categoría Open). Con un aumento del 40% de las inscripciones en comparación con el año anterior, los jueces tuvieron dificultades para seleccionar las potentes imágenes enviadas. Los fotógrafos de la lista corta de profesionales competirán ahora por el título de Photographer of the Year y un premio en efectivo de 25.000 dólares. Los aficionados también han aportado un toque especial a la competición Open, con gran variedad de temas explorados en 10 categorías.

9 Easy Ways to Remember Your Presentation Material : Lifestyle Crush your anxiety with these methods that will help you thoroughly remember all of your slides before you get to them. April 11, 2012 One of the most common reasons we experience presentation anxiety is the fear that we will forget what we have to say and risk losing credibility. A method many use to address this fear is to create PowerPoint slides as a memory aid. However, this is short-sighted because nothing erodes your credibility as a speaker faster than signaling to the audience that you are dependent on your slides. Seasoned presenters are able to announce a slide before showing it. Here are nine tips to help you remember what you have to say. 1. Research into brain science has proven that there is a very deep connection between the way we remember an event and the space in which it occurred. 2. Mind maps are diagrams that allow you to lay out all of your presentation material in a visual shape rather than in list form. 3. 4. How long should you be rehearsing your presentation? 5.

Here is Some Legitimate Science on Pregnancy and Rape | Context and Variation Trigger warning: discussion of violence against women and graphic mention of miscarriage. So Congressperson Todd Akin of Missouri has said some interesting things. Referring to the possibility of pregnancy after rape, and whether abortion should be allowed in this circumstance, he said according to his understanding “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” but that, should one embryo slip through, that “the punishment should be on the rapist, and not attacking the child.” In Akin’s non-apology about his insensitivity towards the “thousands” of rape survivors each year, he remains firm on the point that abortion shouldn’t be allowable for pregnant victims, saying “…I believe deeply in the protection of all life and I do not believe that harming another innocent victim is the right course of action.” I don’t like writing about rape. Some legitimate context Think of all the illnesses and conditions that make the news regularly. But.

How to change the course of human history | Eurozine Art work by Banksy (title unknown). Source: Flickr 1. In the beginning was the word For centuries, we have been telling ourselves a simple story about the origins of social inequality. Almost everyone knows this story in its broadest outlines. There is a fundamental problem with this narrative. It isn’t true. Overwhelming evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines is beginning to give us a fairly clear idea of what the last 40,000 years of human history really looked like, and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative. Simply framing the question this way means making a series of assumptions, that 1. there is a thing called ‘inequality,’ 2. that it is a problem, and 3. that there was a time it did not exist. ‘Inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to technocratic reformers, the kind of people who assume from the outset that any real vision of social transformation has long since been taken off the political table. 2. 3. 4. 5.

90 Things I've Learned From Founding 4 Technology Companies — betashop On October 27, 2010 I wrote a blog post about the “57 Things I Learned Founding 3 Tech Companies.” It has been awesome, flattering, and humbling to see that post went viral and has been seen by so many thousands of people — mainly aspiring entrepreneurs — and has been translated into many languages. This past week while I was in Tokyo for meetings with potential partners for Fab, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on startups. The discussion quickly turned to those 57 things. As the questions came in, I realized that my 2010 list was great for what I had learned as of 2 years ago, but it also was in desperate need of an update to include what I’ve learned more recently, especially as we’ve pivoted from fabulis to Fab in 2011 and then scaled Fab to more than 7.5 million registered users, 7500 supplier partners, 600 team members, and a run-rate of more than $150M in sales in just 15 months. So, here goes. 90 Things I’ve Learned Founding 4 Tech Companies:

‘He had the courage to day unpopular things’: No praise for courting controversy By Guest Contributor Tami Winfrey Harris, cross-posted from What Tami Said This post is not about Christopher Hitchens. It is just that eulogizing of the writer has me pondering the adulation we give people and ideas believed to be outside the bounds of “political correctness.” Hitch was a polarizing figure: He could be a louche wit and raconteur, an exceptional writer, a tireless advocate for the Godless, a moving chronicler of the end of life and also a pompous sexist, racist warmonger and Islamophobe, drunk on privilege (and whatever else). Now, despite all that, many folks were fond of Hitchens–at least that is the impression I get from comments on Gawker, Salon, Slate and the like. At the root of the discussion is the myth of “political correctness,” which I wrote about a few years ago in this space: Disdain for “political correctness” is often positioned as a concern that some important truth is not being spoken for fear of offending someone.

How One Sport Is Keeping a Language, and a Culture, Alive The men gather at an open field in a recreation area of the San Fernando Valley every Sunday, putting chalk to the dusty ground to draw the boundaries of a game that has been a weekly ritual as long as many can remember. After they are done, these men and others who filter in cluster into distinct teams, tossing a six-pound rubber ball to warm up. On a recent Sunday, one of them, Jorge Cruz, 39, lifted a 15-pound glove studded with nails and other ornamentation in the air. He glanced back at his teammates and asked, “You guys ready?” in Zapotec, an indigenous Oaxacan language, before bouncing the ball on a cement slab known as el saque and hitting it toward the opposing team. This is how you start a game of pelota mixteca, a ballgame said by its players in California to have originated hundreds of years ago in Oaxaca, Mexico, though theories abound about whether it is an offshoot of an ancient Mesoamerican game or a European sport brought to the New World. He is not alone. Mr.

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