A Little Introduction

Right. Um. I seem to have acquired a blog. This is frighteningly easy so far: doubtless terrible things will happen later. I don't really have a mission statement, or anything like that: I just spend far too much of my time already looking at and commenting on other people's blogs, so the next logical step was to set up my own, so I could spend far too much of my time dealing with that instead. Just in case you were wondering, I'm currently a studying for a masters in Political Theory, which I will finish in June, so, understandably, some of my comments might be about politics. That said, I have been known to rant about just about anything once I get in the right frame of mind, so I could end up posting about just about anything. A more respectable reason for doing this than my inflated sense of the importance of my views is so that various people who know me can keep track of what on earth I am doing with myself, but that is just really a not particularly convincing cover for my megalomania. I haven't actually got any concrete plans for posts yet, but I'm sure that something somewhere will arouse my interest enough to encourage me to stick my grubby little paws in where they don't belong and write something on it fairly quickly.

On a more serious level, as a political theorist, despite having come to the blogosphere rather late, I think that it is a quite marvellous thing. Not only does it offer me the possibility of publishing material which people might voluntarily read, rather than cornering people in pubs, but it exposes those who use it - who might not be the people most in need of it - to all kinds of new information and opinions. Despite the snideness and insults, the possibility it holds out of dialogue has a huge potential for good. The exposure to genuine political discussion, rather than the mudslinging which characterizes so much of what passes as that elsewhere, ought to be a good thing: reasoned and reasonable discussions, and even arguments, if conducted in the right way, have the power to transform political debate and through that, political outcomes. Not that this only holds true of politics, of course: discussions about and information on all kinds of things happen in the blogosphere, and this is true of most of them. Although I have, as one would expect of someone studying political theory, quite strong views about politics, which will probably be fairly apparent fairly quickly, I hope that I am not a dogmatist, and willing, sometimes, to admit that I am wrong, so comments from any part of the political spectrum are welcome: if you think I'm wrong, say why, and I promise to at least think about it.

This isn't just going to be me muttering away to myself about the inquities of consumer capitalism, though. I'll be posting on more or less anything I feel like, including, but not restricted to, whatever I'm reading at the moment, bits and bobs of music, the terrible fate that is supporting Wolverhampton Wanderers football club, food, and perhaps even student life. Maybe other people will find what is inevitably going to be a disjointed collection of concerns interesting, maybe they won't: I'm going to pretend I don't care.