Banned in China, banned at your workplace
If you encountered any problems accessing bluematter at your workplace today, it probably had something to do with Saturday's post: 'F***: The economics of coarse language'. Taking this paper as my starting point, I was discussing how coarse language serves a very useful signalling purpose and how, contrary to the author's assertion, word taboo-isation can be perfectly rational.
I have now taken the offending post offline, but if you are interested email me and I will be happy to forward it to you. Also, I would be grateful if anyone who encountered problems and can now access the blog could drop me a line and let me know (I am not sure whether I've been blacklisted temporarily or whether this will have a more lasting effect).
While on the subject of censorship, I also have a nagging suspicion that bluematter is no longer accessible from China: I used to get hits on a daily basis, but in the past 20 days there hasn't been a single visitor from the land of the Great Firewall.
Can't swear, can't talk politics: where's the fun in that?
