One of my readers (hello, Dennis) complained when I saw him last that I write too much about computers and open source, so this is my reasoning behind why using open source technology is not only a good idea but really quite important.
In the nineteenth century, a debate arose in the locksmithing community about whether [...]

For a long time, I supported the ‘no-platform for the BNP’ policy, specifically at the LSE Students’ Union. It meant, in essence, that the BNP were not to be invited to speak on any LSE SU platform and that no member of the LSE SU could speak on a platform with a member of the [...]

As I understand it, the modernist take on nationalism requires that the nation is not prior to nationalism; that is to say, nationalism may cause the nation or something causes both the nation and nationalism to come about. The nation cannot come first and therefore cannot cause the nationalism.
There are many, competing definitions of nationalism. [...]

Writing in today’s G2 section of The Guardian, Lionel Shriver asks why it is not acceptable for a modern woman to want to fall in love to be her chiefmost aspiration. The article is worth reading, but this made me think:
Yet I would still commend the old-fashioned sequence of 1) fall in love; 2) have [...]

One of the points of free speech, I think, is that it allows people to identify problems and so cause them to be rectified. One of the reasons, I think, for protecting free speech is that this rectification may cause problems for people at the top, who are able to act against speech they dislike.
Enter [...]

Matt Sinclair echoes Norman Tebbit in saying that the BNP don’t fit on the right and by extension must be of the left.
Giving definitions such as ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ are not in and of themselves good, but only by the extent of the usefullness.
Is it useful to describe the BNP as right-wing?
I would say that [...]

The etymology of the word ‘democracy’ is often mistaken. It comes from the Greek demos and kratein. Literally, it means power to the people, so long as ‘the people’ is restricted to, essentially, the class of property owners. Dahl makes pains about using the term ‘polyarchy’ to refer to what most call democracies, but the [...]

Evening all…
Downsian convergence (I believe that’s how you spell it) is the theory that, in a two-party system, parties will tend to the centre.
It has just struck me that the tendency to the centre does not work. Moving to the centre from (say) the left will lose the extreme left. Put another way, where n [...]