We are increasingly coming to suspect that when reading adverts for goods of which you have experience, it is well to bear in mind a strong probability that what is promised is precisely what you won’t get. This is how it seems to work: The features you particularly want are those you’ve not been getting…. read more »
In IC15 (December 1984) there appeared an article under the above title suggesting that the orthodox view, that people generally need work if they are to lead satisfactory lives, was mistaken. The article put forward reasons for believing that there is a large group (it may even be a majority) that would be happier without… read more »
We recently attended a one-day Conference held by the English Language Society, on the theme Language and the State. Most of the speakers and participants were academics, some of them experienced talkers on radio and television who used their skills to hold the audience’s attention. The occasion might well be termed a fact-fest. The facts… read more »
Ideological Commentary announces itself as “an independent journal of systematic ideology,” but we do not claim final knowledge of this theory; the formulation that looked like the ultimate last month needs alteration now, and the account given here will be subject to continuous revision. The theory was created and largely developed by the late Harold… read more »
In IC12, which was issued in August 1984, there was an invitation to the “Socialist” Party to counter our attacks on them: One sort of contribution will (until further notice) certainly be printed: anything of up to 1,000 words defending the Socialist Party of Great Britain or expounding its case. We do, of course, reserve… read more »
In IC14 we spoke of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the anarchists as being less different from one another than each of them likes to think; we showed reason to believe that they both express the same , major ideology, that those calling themselves the Socialist Party of Great Britain would be better… read more »
In 1845, in Bayreuth, Johann Kaspar Schmidt published a book. Why should this interest IC? Because he used the pseudonym “Max Stirner” and the book was Der Einziger and sein Eigentum, appearing in English as The Ego and his Own; the Case of the Individual Against Authority. The copy in front of us has been… read more »
New ideas are still coming up, and are still being slapped right back down again. A maverick named Rupert Sheldrake has published a book entitled A New Science of Life; the Hypothesis of Formative Causation. According to a reviewer in TLS: The most grotesque of Sheldrake’s proposed experiments is to check whether rats in one… read more »
One of the concepts of linguistic theory is the meta-language. If a statement is made about a language, that statement (this concept suggests) is not itself in that language, however much it may appear to be so. It cannot be because if it were in that language, it could not be about it, it cannot… read more »
Supernatural Powers: “When I wrote Chinese Looking Glass, certain superficial critics in England sneered at me for suggesting that superstitious belief and religious custom had survived Communism in China itself. The Chinese Communists, being rather better acquainted with the subject, have repeatedly admitted that the supernatural has been among their most stubborn ideological foes.” (Dennis… read more »