Summary: Brendan O’Neill is the editor of spiked online and a columnist for the Big Issue and Reason. He also writes for a variety of other publications, including the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Australian. In this episode we discuss how spiked started off as a Marxist publication and where it’s ended up. According to spiked’s own self-description the magazine is a fan of reason, liberty, progress, economic growth, choice, conviction and thought experiments about the future, and not so big on eco-miserabilism, identikit politicians, nostalgia, dumbing down and determinism. In this episode you’ll hear Hussalonia’s “Everybody Should Stop Doing Everything,” an excerpt from the Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another”, Noam Chomsky describing the problem of free will, and Captain Kirk reading from the constitution of the United States of America. The music you’re listening to right now is the theme for Barney Miller and is being played in tribute to Abe Vigoda who, this time, has really died, but in just a moment you’ll be listening to Brendan O’Neil and I discuss how to hang on to bourgeois liberty.
