Morality Quiz and an Overview of Popular Religions

YourMorals.org is a website setup to encourage people to, you guessed it, test their morals. It’s comprised of a series of quizzes designed by the team of psychologists behind the site.

The site is a very American take on morals, they also don’t appear to know the difference between sex and gender. I just did their introduction quiz and it comes as no surprise that I don’t fit into either of the (pathetically) only two options Americans have to vote for this November. Nowhere did it ask if I thought it’s worse for society to only have two choices for popular political affiliation, the world is more complex than blue vs. red. Oh well.

On the self compassion test I passed with flying colours, go me! Some of the quizzes are just fun to take and they are backed up with further resources to find out more about the results and where to research it. They also have a way to setup groups to see the values of an organization like a classroom.

For members of my class please join a group by clicking here.

If anybody knows of a similar moral study designed for global citizens (or even just Canadians) please share in the comments below!

On a similar thought to morality, there is religion. If you’re looking for a very brief overview of the plethora of religions out there then you may want to check out the Big Religion Comparison Chart. Of course, this is really a high-level overview and like YourMorals it links to more information online for you to peruse. Prior to looking at the chart I had no idea that Unitarian Universalism was thing, although I’m sure I’ve seen their logo before.



October 30th, 2012 by Adam

Philosophy in 90 Minutes

Need to get up to speed on a key philosopher? Well, you’re in luck as someone on YouTube has created a playlist of audio recordings covering the life and thinking of a few philosophers. You can listen to Philosophy in 90 Minutes here.

Here’s the one I was keen to listen to on Hegel:

I still feel I don’t fully understand Hegel, but that seems appropriate given that it is Hegel after all.

The following philosophers are covered in the playlist:

  • Plato
  • Aristotle
  • Aquinas
  • Descartes
  • Spinoza
  • Hume
  • Rousseau
  • Kant
  • Hegel
  • Shopenhauer
  • Kierkegaard
  • Marx
  • Nietzsche
  • Wittgenstein
  • Sartre


October 26th, 2012 by Adam

Critical Media Literacy: Beware Big Media?

I have done some volunteer work trying to encourage media literacy in the digital world and I find myself running into similar conceptual issues that existed before the world got online. There are core issues associated with large media companies influencing how we engage politics and economics and the digital world is not immune to it. This is even more true as the line between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ media blur.

These issues I allude to can best be summed up by people smarter than me. As you watch/listen to the talks below you may say that the internet changes a lot of what’s brought up and I would agree. At the same time, the reach (and in some cases caliber) of citizen journalists is still not up to par with multinational massive media manufactures.

Michael Parenti gave a talk in 1993 that is still relevant today about how large media companies can and do influence the way we debate issues as a society. He opens with a comparison between a large American media company and the propaganda paper Pravda from the USSR; his criticism of the American media company is still relevant today.

Early on he talks about product placement and how insidious it can be, and today we don’t even bat an eye at the notion of including product placement into media production. Also, the threat of the “liberal media” was a debate back in 1993 whereas I thought it was a newer myth.

It’s worth sticking around for the questions, my favourtie was about the Exxon Valdez oil spill (think about his answer and how it compares to coverage of BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill).

Now take a moment and think about how you’re being exposed to this thanks to a blog. The future seems so different right? Not so fast.

Parenti’s lecture got me thinking of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s take on the media in Manufacturing Consent which I watched in high school and is also, sadly, still pertinent to the media of today. Wikipedia has a good summation of their five key points of media control and you can watch the entire documentary below.



October 24th, 2012 by Adam

The Coming Civil War over General-purpose Computing

Cory Doctorow is a smart thinker when it comes to computers and how they relate to our basic rights. Over the summer he delviered a lecture titled The Coming Civil War over General-purpose Computing and it’s a fascinating look into the future of DRM (digital rights management), firmware, security, openness, and how we as a culture relate to computers.

Watch the lecture below and you may also want to check out the text version of his argument.



October 17th, 2012 by Adam

Mark Kingwell on Cities and the Politics of Architecture


Mark Kingwell was recently on TVO’s The Agenda to discuss the concrete jungle; essentially, his examination of architecture, politics, and phenomenology.

It’s a good episode that anybody interested in politics or architecture should watch (of listen).

In 1800, only 3% of the world’s population lived in urban areas. By 2008, that number had swelled to more than half. Author Mark Kingwell says that despite this, we still do not understand how cities work, and the dynamic relationship between architecture and politics. Mark Kingwell joins Piya Chattopadhyay to discuss his book, “Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City
,” and how public place and political space cannot be separated.



August 26th, 2012 by Adam
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