MAD?

What if deterrence fails? Here’s a quadruple-shot of caffeine for your Tuesday morning:

Every silver lining has a cloud, an occasional series: nuclear science, geostrategic insecurity and civilisation extinction edition.

Somewhat, IMHO, more significant than most of the babbling business of communicative noise that sustains social media systems, blogging or vlogging platforms, podcasts, news websites and broadcasters, and yet likely remains for reasons of abject horror and algorithmic self-selection as quite unlikely to percolate to general, global awareness or constructive media and political conversation. Communications systems are probabilistically biased to self-gravitate around unsurprising trivialities and meaningless noise – this is (also) a function of entropy.

The long slow dissipative arc and trajectory through combinatorial complexity into the oblivion of thermodynamic equilibrium is simply a fact of nature. How we get there really is largely a matter of choice. Notwithstanding the possibility of useful statistical exceptions and clever strategising against (our own, all too human!) biases towards and dependencies upon adversarial competition and dissonant difference, this process of self-disassembly can occur much, much faster than we are politically, culturally or psychologically ready and willing to comprehend.