Due to lack of financial support, this blog is on sabbatical until December or January. In the meantime, why not browse the archives. Topics covered in 2009 include:
• crazy equity markets; zero interest rates; Nouriel Roubini; gushing over Obama; Shazia Mirza; feminism; offensiveness; architecture; Norman Foster; Germany's clerics; Deutsche Bank
• the myth of deregulation; black swans; rationality and credulity in markets; Volcker, Greenspan, Bernanke; academic diligence; the Royal Society; Left vs. Right on dumbing down; individualism and conservative journalists; John Peel; Yes, Genesis, ELP
• 'clever crazies'; crooked journal editors; Adam Phillips; Hobbes, Nietzsche and Beveridge; competitive societies; corporate 'authenticity'; faking it; labels
• bonuses; training as scapegoat; resident fools; banking and other corruptions; pragmatism and climate change as dogma; ideological bias in research; the child protection industry and the sum of human happiness
• the Home Office; Quickgate; Joanna Lumley; Alain de Botton; Donald Davidson; Blade Runner; academic philosophy; The Matrix; the c-word; Gates of Vienna; coercion as opportunity
• philosophy and Star Trek; reflexivity; the Queen and the LSE; UK's credit status; sterling versus dollar; Mediocracy for Dummies Pt. 1; depression; drugs that cause madness; how to reverse iatrogenic psychosis
• testosterone and banking; the Financial Times; the myth of right-wing overshoot; the wrong kind of critics are 'whingers'; the new elites; historical parallels for the Noughties; economics and the emperor's clothes; Niall Ferguson and Paul Krugman
• Trivialised does as trivialised is — a non-egalitarian take on the MP expenses saga, featuring a cast that includes Boris Johnson, Gordon Brown, Balliol College, the BBC, the Daily Mail, 'grumblies', Tracey Emin, Kenneth Minogue, Simon Cowell, Nadine Dorries, and Peter Oborne
• sex; John Bercow; Sheffield teenagers; men and woolly monkeys; Profumo scandal; Daily Mirror 1963, Daily Telegraph 2009; the black hole of government debt; think tanks and neutrality; Obama and the NHS
Update
• authoritarian backlash; Bernie Ecclestone; certified academic ‘philosophers’; the duty to have sex; Auberon Waugh, porn and Viagra; ‘research’ proving conservatives are pussies; “the Thatcha” and the Guardian; Climategate; redistribution of professorships; mediocrity and technicality; simplicity and Descartes; 2009 Turner Prize winner
Dissident culture costs no less than establishment culture. The annual research budget of Oxford University works out at about £170,000 per researcher. At present, my colleagues and I survive by our own efforts, and manage to squeeze out the occasional blog post, and a book every now and then. Those with spare funds, and a desire to see a little more genuine diversity in the West's cultural output, should consider supporting our efforts by means of donations. Free internet content is fine for opinion and commentary, but it is not going to generate original research. We cannot guarantee to provide support for a particular worldview, but we would certainly produce material different from what is currently being generated in universities, and more in keeping with the spirit of pre-Welfare-State academia.
