134. LIVING WITH GHOSTS - Haunted by Football
Read More‘I don’t believe in ghosts, yet I am living with one…‘
133. THE HARD PROBLEM OF BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS - On The Difficulty and Need For Waking From Dogmatic Slumbers
Read More“I’ve been thinking a lot about consciousness this week. Not the traditional philosophical questions about mind and body, but political consciousness. Specifically Black Consciousness.“
131. UNWELCOME VISITORS - When Jordan Peterson Came to Michaela
Read More“We should have more unwelcome visitors to our schools, not fewer. More opportunities for students to ask questions and poke holes. More academic freedom to develop an enduring culture of critique and scrutiny so that ideas are never accepted without a fight. If we are worried about the young and impressionable minds of our students, it’s time that we stopped them being so impressionable.“
129. STRANGER THINGS - Leave the Battles to the Children
Read More“I love the Netflix series Stranger Things. I’m supposed to. It is literally targeted directly to me: a weirdo child of the 80s…“
128. THE QUEEN IS DEAD - Long Live The King
Read More“As Britain comes to terms with the loss of its longest reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, who died on Thursday, I was struck by the immediacy of transition from Queen to King. In an instance the previous settled gender of certain phrases - our national anthem, ‘God save the Queen’, prayers within the Church of England asking to ‘replenish her with the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that she may always incline to thy will’, the pledges taken by members of parliament to ‘be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors’ - had to update and adapt.“
127. REMEMBERING WHERE WE CAME FROM - on the privilege of travel
Read More“what it is we travel for today? What is the lack we seek to find? What is the need that makes us leave the comfort of our homes and brave the journeys beyond?“
120. TALKING ABOUT MY CONSTITUTION - Why Conversation Is More Important Than Codification
Read More“The very act of codifying into a constitution the core principles of how your society is to be run is to commit future generations to values that they may not actually hold. It is a normative act, wherein one generation is imposing a set of values in stone on the basis that they believe future generations ought to hold such values. But while human beings remain autonomous agents capable of choosing many different values such an imposition has no guarantee of sticking unless the values are, in fact, actually held by the citizens for whom they are endorsed. This means constitutions are either attempting the impossible and trying to force people into valuing something they don’t value, or they are redundant, as they simply articulate values already held.“
119. DECOLONISING DECOLONISATION - Why Diversifying Reading Lists Isn’t Enough
Read More“I found myself asking the obvious next question: is our own British colonialism taught openly and honestly in British schools?”
118. SHOWING OUR TRUE SELVES - What Does It Tell Us When We Tidy Our House?
Read More“If we all are running around like headless chickens to make things look nice whenever someone visits then that must mean that none of us actually live our lives in the way that we present to others that we do.“
115. IS THIS A POST ABOUT WILL SMITH SLAPPING CHRIS ROCK? - Independent Media, Established Media and Power
Read More“A few weeks ago someone suggested on Twitter that I write my next post about the relationship between the established media and power. “Is independent journalism a counter to the established media or just a rival for its central position?“
114. THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY - Remembering All of the Dead
Read More“Must death really silence critique?“
113. SIMULATED HORROR - Is It OK To Spend Your Free Time Plotting Imaginary Violence?
Read More“A student asked me my thoughts on children playing violent video games. My first response was to ask him why he thought it mattered that the players were children. Why not adults playing violent video games too?“
112. KILLING THE AUTHENTIC SELF - Why Is It So Hard To Be Yourself At Work?
Read More“It’s time that schools became more diverse, and their staff, at least in the short-term, a little less comfortable.“
105. MY SPIDEY-SENSE WAS TINGLING - Have We Forgotten How To Deal With Conflict in Civil Society?
Read More“sometimes living together means compromise and not doing exactly what you want.“
104. DOWN ON DOWNING STREET - Refocusing The Ethical Inquiry Away From Christmas Parties
Read More“Because if this government falls - and it should - it should be for their far more egregious moral wrongs than this purely selfish complaint: how come they got to have a party last year when we couldn’t have one ourselves?“
103. SAYING NO TO WHAT IS DONE - On The Tyranny of Appealing to Decorum
Read More“But recently I have been thinking about a pet peeve of mine. Possibly the most frustrating appeal to authority of them all. I shall call it the appeal to decorum…“
99. DUNE BUGGED ME - On Being Bored of War
Read More“We have been primed to be ready for war. We have been conditioned to expect it imminently. We have been told that a time will come when we have to pick a side and that we may not even be able to trust our closest friends. We have been fed the ideological norms of conflict escalation and had massacre and genocide normalised. All in the name of entertainment. To assume such repeated and sustained messaging will have no impact is to ignore the evidence of all other successful marketing strategies.“
96. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE INDIVIDUAL: On The Incoherency of Individualism
Read More“A student asked if we could imagine a world where Boris Johnson announced a shortage of petrol (or toilet roll, or dried pasta - name whatever limited resource you like) and, instead of immediately triggering panic buying, the announcement is greeted by a wave of collective reason. I will only buy the limited good if I really need it now, understanding that others may need this now limited resource more than I do. Perhaps usually I fill up my car whenever it hits the final quarter of a tank? Now I know there is not enough fuel to go around maybe I’ll wait until I’m closer to empty? That sort of thing…“
95. TRANS ATHLETES ARE ATHLETES: Exposing Transphobia In Our Discussions About Sport
Read More“The first thing I did was point out that this was quite a strange question to ask, and that we had to be careful that it wasn't coming from a place of prejudice or discrimination…“
94. TWENTY YEARS LATER: What Is The Purpose of Remembering 9/11?
Read More“It is not said enough that on September 11th, 2001, a significant number of people around the world witnessed on live television the death of nearly three thousand people. Seeing one person die would be considered a trauma. Something requiring years of therapy. Something from which we might never recover. Who knows how many of the terrible events of the last twenty years are the result of a traumatised humanity who never got the professional help they needed to come to terms with what they saw when those towers fell?“