A brief history of time, where the inception of this blog is taken to be the beginning…

2008

This blog started out with grand ambitions, and its first post set out a solution to the age-old chicken and egg problem. I wrote that the egg probably came first, but was met with a swift and brutal rebuttal. The problem rages on.

When Obama fever was beginning to sweep the world, this blog maintained a cautious stance and argued that all politicians, no matter how well-intentioned, are subject to the same corrupting laws.

The worldly was followed with the otherworldly, and a short rumination on whether truth exists, concluding that it does, and that there’s nothing to worry about.

Moving presumptuously to the territory of political theory, this blog proposed a possible way to improve democracy: by making it a meritocratic system in which the better informed the voter, the more valued the vote. It wasn’t quite that simplistic, but then it wasn’t that much more sophisticated either.

“What’s so good about optimism?” this blog asked, and hoped to show that optimism is a rather overrated approach to life, and that it could be argued that optimism is in some sense worse than pessisimism.

With Obama fever still at a high, and the presidential race heating up, this blog took it upon itself to take a closer look at McCain’s overvaluing (understandable in the circumstances, perhaps) of experience. I argued that experience is of itself neither here nor there – results are a much better indicator of electability.

Continuing with the question of what can be known, I posted a short and possibly somewhat confusing piece on the infinite regress of illusions—the reason it’s impossible to believe that everything is an illusion.

This blog then turned a little weird, with a post entitled On Strangeness – a rumination on the expression “truth is stranger than fiction.”

That was followed by a note on beauty, which sought to show, in only a few sentences, that beauty is objective.

How did our morality evolve? I sought to show that the more moral a society, the more likely it is to dominate other societies without resorting to violence, because their lifestyle appeals to other societies more than their own.

If, reader, you ever happened to doubt that free will is little more than an illusion, Free will and deterministic predictions is for you. It argues that if determinism is true, it would lead us to unworkable conclusions about human behaviour.

This blog then went out of its way to praise America for quite possibly being a new model for nationhood – even if other countries will unlikely be affected by this.

What’s an economist to do? The economic crisis, then beginning to show its true ugliness, has brought out economists and pundits from the woodwork, whose words have the potential to inflame the situation. But they have a quandary: does retiring from the debate help or hinder?

This blog then wrote a 566-word post on identity – none of which its writer can remember.

2009

After a long and mysterious hiatus, this blog sprang back into action with a piece on videogames as art. Considering the positions of those on both sides of the divide, it goes on to conclude that videogames are an art form, but no individual game has reached the status of real art—of the kind we see in literature and music—just yet. With enough ingenuity and imagination, though, it will happen comparatively soon.

Next came a look at controversial scientific research on the relation between race and IQ, which contended that it should not be so controversial after all. But it must be pursued responsibly, and this includes defining exactly what “race” is, and considering whether a more accurate term might not be “biogeographic ancestry”.

The month of May brought a closer look at Wikipedia. Taking as a starting point a debate between the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and the would-be destroyer of it (slight exaggeration), Andrew Keen, the post looked at whether Wikipedia’s noble goals are really so viable, and whether its weaknesses are as grave as some might have us believe.

Two fictional debaters, imaginatively named Mr A and Mr B, enter the fray. In a heated contest, they debate the nature of prophets, and whether they can or should be trusted.

Why can’t Britain compete with The Wire? That was the subject of the next piece, which argued that the reason America makes great social drama is that, being a comparatively young nation, it still has a need to define itself through a narrative medium; where, on the other hand, Britain being a post-imperial nation, cannot face up to its present realities.

Are blogs the end of civilization? Naturally, this blog argues against such an absurd proposition.

The Western Canon is an institution that has, in some form or another, existed for hundreds of years. It is a great guide to the greatest works of Western culture. But do we really need it?

God gets very angry when his people worship false gods, but is that even possible?

George Orwell wrote political novels and essays that left us with a more vivid understanding and fear of totalitarianism. Even so, is the word “Orwellian” not overused? This blog argues that it is, and that it is almost tantamount to a George Orwell personality cult—not exactly the sort of thing that the man himself would have wanted.

We all might have vivid ideas of what utopia would be like, but these images are usually just utopias for ourselves and not for all mankind. I argue that that is because a perfect world is an inherently difficult thing to even imagine—at least one inhabited by humans.

Amidst talk that the BBC might invite Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, onto the Question Time panel, this blog takes a look at what all the controversy is about.

One of the central issues of our or any time is that of religion and how it should be interpreted. This post takes a closer look at the difficulties of religious interpretation, and posits that they are not quite as interpretable as many religious people think, and that if they are, that’s not a good sign.

With the Man Booker and the Nobel Literature Prize not even briefly considering science fiction writers, this blog asks why it is that sci-fi is not treated as seriously in literary circles.

Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time caused a minor media flurry, and much soul-searching was prompted. Is it ever right to invite extremists on political panel programmes? Diane Abbott argued that Griffin’s appearance has contaminated political discourse; this blog argued that the opposite is true.

Timelessness is something assumed to be true of great art. If it has stood the test of the centuries in which it has been around, then we can say that it exists somehow independently of time. But is this true? This post attempts to explore this question in terms of human evolution.

Prompted by an article in The Nation, this blog then forayed into the philosophy of Hobbes, especially as it regards political liberty.

In purely probabilistic terms, the next post concluded that it is extremely unlikely that God exists. Which was a revelation.

Following two BBC documentaries on beauty by Roger Scruton and Waldemar Januszczak, this blog attempted to get to the bottom of the question of beauty, and found glaring weaknesses in the arguments of both men.

A theologian by the name of Claude Mariottini took especial issue with a previous post of mine which showed that worshipping false gods was impossible. Despite his expertise, his counter-arguments were surprisingly weak: hence this swift rebuttal.

2009′s last post looks at the “invisible gardener” parable by the philosopher John Wisdom, which attempts to show that there’s no reason to believe in God. Despite its persuasiveness, there is a good reason why a religious believer won’t be convinced by it.