The Hoarchive

Dear Reader,

If you are working your way through this collection without taking offence; then truly we are concerned for your social wellbeing — for this paper aims to sit at every frontier of formal discourse, which necessitates a tapestry of positions to be posited. Be they left, right, progressive or regressive; this paper aims to include all excluded ideas in daily campus exchanges.

So if you take offence, good. Half of the content in here offends us too. But offence is truly a healthy feeling — it allows us to challenge views we would otherwise hold unchallenged. It allows us to measure our views against those that oppose them, to make them clearer in a critical light. If we surmount this challenge, our foundations for these feelings are fortified, and if we do not — then these beliefs are but dead dogma that we should not pride ourselves in holding. As such, frequently we should ask ourselves the age-old challenge of introspection: what would we say to the flat-earthers, the moon landing truthers, the dinosaur deniers? How solid are our first principles?

Indeed we ask you to hold in question any agents or authorities that tell you which ideas are too odious, too influential, and too dangerous for your ill developed rationality to handle. For it is discourse closing non-platforming powers that have iteratively caused populations to sleepwalk blindly into a banal milieu of evil. Such actions are all the more insidious if we consent to the cutting of ideas from the picture — we are choosing to blinker ourselves! All the more pertinent in the sheltered environment of a university; if we are not armed with the critical faculties to personally protect our cherished ideas, how do we expect them to self-sustain in the great wide world? Where one and all do not necessarily share the same base ideas? As Hitchens before implored; should any prying power tell you what you are too easily manipulated to cope with; tell them to pick a number, get in line, and kiss your arse.

Hence in this paper you will find not a manifesto but a platform. A table on which to place, pillage, adopt and discard ideas. You will find as many views as there are articles, the emphasis for the writers has been to adopt the mentality of one holding the positions of their articles, whether they subscribe to them or not. The articles are scarcely edited; we are not looking to create a conformist push. If in them you find gaping holes, then good: write them down, form a retort, deploy it when needed. For only then will this paper have achieved its aims.

You also will not find a closed circuit. Short of inciting violence, we aim with our writers to be sufficiently commodious as to hold all peripheral positions no matter their perceived moral worth.

You won’t find a body that opposes student politics, though at times it may appear so. Instead the aim is quite the opposite — we hold that the protection provided by a campus setting should allow a student body to act as a watchdog weighing on the boundaries of society. Before we each enter the world where words have costs, we can shape our ideas in an insulated environment. Yet this requires vigorous challenge and debate to be efficacious. Not the airy exchange of pre-approved positions but a genuine creative field of argument. That is what we aim to provide.

Finally, at no point do we wish to make direct attacks — not that there aren’t juicy examples to target — but because it isn’t in our interest to hate and berate but rather punish a pernicious attitude that is percolating into student discourse, namely the ostracising of disquieting outsider ideas.

What instead you will find is an imperative to think for yourself. A chance to challenge and be challenged in a place where positions aren’t pre-emptively prohibited, where you can trade ideas; not abuse. Where writers won’t be pushed out or shouted down in the fear that they’ll frighten a cushioned audience.

And if you find such introspection disagreeable then we ask why it is you fear that your views won’t hold up to scrutiny.

Yours liberally,

C. Snitchens

While he who sings with his tongue on fire,
Gargles in the rat race choir,
Cares not to come up any higher,
But would rather drag you down in the hole that he’s in
Bob Dylan