Episode Details

About Dr. Jamie Roberts: I've spent much of my adult life studying at university and then working at universities. After starting out in Psychology and Mathematics I moved to English literature in which I completed my honours degree. You write a short dissertation - using Coetzee's Disgrace, I tried to talk about the nature of male sexual desire and critiqued liberal feminism for failing to engage with it in any way. After a soft cancellation following my first encounter with ID Pol - this was 2002 - I moved to Politics to complete my PhD, but only because I found someone who was willing to supervise me, and also, I could only write about literature in the way I wanted to in the Politics department. lol. In my PhD I tried to develop a model to explain the nature of good and evil. I drew on literature and philosophy (Plato, Conrad, Tolsoy, Nietzsche - amongst others) to explore how people do bad things for the sake of power and belonging to the group. I learned that nothing ever really changes - the way the academics around me behaved fitted very closely with what I read in various classic works of literature and philosophy. The PhD experience (2005-2009) was pretty grim. There was more miserable ID Pol and idiot Postmodernism - and more cruel arts academics. I was so disillusioned with academia I got a job teaching academic skills at the University of New South Wales. This was unambitious of me, but I was able to do a lot of teaching, which I still love, and essentially teach people to think critically and write coherently. In 2020 I became an academic at Sydney University in the department of Politics and International Relations. This was quite a surprise as I had really given up on academia. At USYD I taught International Relations / International Security and Politics and Popular Culture, and I wrote The Way of the Intellectual Dark Web. The Identity Politics was always bad there, but it has got worse in recent years - so no, I don't think we are past peak woke yet. Honestly, despite many high points with teaching, for the most part, my whole being recoils at how intellectually corrupt university is. Working there is very much like sticking with an abusive relationship. I'm actually currently on personal leave because it has all become too much - the bullying superiors, the censorious students. It's very hard to do my job; i.e. pursue truth. I'm always balancing my commitment to truth with my own fears about how much I will be attacked if I step out of line (and the attacks are quite regular).Outside all this, I write novels - nothing published yet. I also write music. And I am starting to build a vast art environment on some land that I own - my dream has always been to do this (The Wollemi Art Farm). My heart lies with art: literature, music and whatever I'm doing on my land, but also with teaching. I hope to bring people out to my land and teach them about the classics: Shakespeare, Shelley, Carroll, Sterne, Larkin, Forster. I also run quests on my land - like Zelda, but in real life.Oh, and I also spend a lot of my time with my two children - I love going on adventures with them. There's nothing better, really.

_____________________________________________________________________ If you would like to contact me, my website is: https://theradicalcenterconsulting.com/ and I am on twitter @JLeslieElliott And if you appreciate this ongoing project and would like to support my continued work in this area you can chip in at any of the following (thank you very much!): https://www.paypal.me/jleslieelliott https://www.buymeacoffee.com/radicalcenter https://www.patreon.com/theradicalcenter