Remember, debts that can't be paid, won't be paid. - Vox Day

The second of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism [Dennett] has died at the age of 82. He will be remembered both for his own philosophical works, for the critique of them in The Irrational Atheist, and for providing one of the great atheist memes ever to grace the Internet.

I have tended to consider Guns, Germs, and Steel to be little more than an ahistorical concoction that combines pop history and science with illogical speculation and political correctness.

Japanese literature is like no other. What the wedding is to the English novel, the suicide is to the Japanese novel. Furthermore, the absence of Christian sexual mores, the cultural inclination toward passivity and fatalism, and the lack of an individualist hero tradition will tend to strike the average Western reader as strange and, in some cases, even bordering on the perverse. But the technical skill of Japanese novelists, combined with their very different takes on the human condition, makes Japanese literature one of the most interesting and rewarding literatures available for reading on the planet.