Veganism is apparently the fastest growing ‘lifestyle movement’ in the UK today. Within the space of a decade the number of British vegans has increased by 350% and now over half a million people follow a diet free of animal products. Whilst this is still only about 1% of the adult population, the accelerating growth […]

Jürgen Habermas draws a central distinction between our ‘lifeworld’ and ‘systems-world’. The lifeworld is said to be rooted in society’s collective subjective perception, its shared values and influences, as opposed to fully-rationalized systems which favour the quantifiable realm of ‘efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control’. Habermas proceeds to argue that the crisis of modernity is rooted […]

A recent television interview between the clinical psychologist Jordan B Peterson and the Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman has gone viral and clocked up 8.4 million views to date on YouTube. The interview focussed on Peterson’s established critiques of ‘radical feminist’ gender politics. Many words have been spilled criticising Newman’s ‘umbrage-stoking’ tactics and praising […]

Last week Peter Tatchell, the LGBT rights campaigner and self-appointed director of the ‘Peter Tatchell Foundation’, relaunched his campaign for a ‘Civil Commitment Pact’ which would correct marriage’s ‘one-size-fits-all model of relationship recognition’. My proposed civil commitment pact would allow people to nominate any “significant other” in their life as their next of kin, inheritance […]

Our last TMI blog post ended by critiquing propaganda thinking, in which we assent ‘uncritically to widely held beliefs’, before offering a closing defence of discursive thinking, whereby ‘the reasonable questions of those who nevertheless hold fast to unreasonable conclusions are integrated into rational discourse’. To put some flesh on the bare-bones of these claims […]

Earlier this week the Higher Education Minister, Jo Johnson, ‘confirmed plans to allow the newly created Office for Students (OfS) to fine or suspend institutions that fail to protect freedom of speech on campuses’. This announcement came in response to concerns over University guest speakers being wrongly ‘no-platformed’ due to student protests and safe space […]

Today Spain is engulfed by a constitutional crisis in the wake of last month’s Catalan independence referendum. Yesterday a vote in Scotland threatened the unity of another European sovereign state. Tomorrow will likely see the turn of another region (perhaps Flanders or South Tyrol?) to make its own attempt at secession. Ryan Barnes interpreted this […]

Earlier this month the Boundary Commission for England published its proposals for new Parliamentary constituency boundaries as part of its third and final phase of public consultation. The stated aim of the Commission’s boundary changes is to independently implement Parliament’s decision to ‘reduce the number of constituencies in the UK to 600 from 650, and […]