It is interesting that people are so easily swept up and away by tides of gossip and associated qualitative judgements of authors or speakers and influential personalities when the substance of their assertions, the meaning and significance of their position in relation to the facts is so much more important. The arguments around – and […]
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Environmental Mismanagement
Context: Eradicating black rats on Palmyra Atoll uncovers eye-opening indirect effects A perspicacity and intelligence sufficient to the task of successfully and conscientiously managing our natural environment is quite positively anathema to administrative bureaucracies. There is in this a microcosm of a certain functional or instrumental narrowing of representation and behavioural engagement which institutional interdictions […]
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Blindsight and Barren Repetition
In a world that is implicitly oriented towards the replication of its own processes, behaviours and conventions, all we ever do is look backwards, and even as we travel into unknown futures yet always and already blinded by the fallible visions of a shared imagination and memory that, like systems of belief, is so easily […]
Implicit and endemic grey-zone ambiguities mean that this might never be attributed to anything other than (yet) another heartlessly self-serving criminal enterprise that is leveraging the inflated value of hospitals and health data during a public health crisis. I expect there are some logical and legal hurdles in defining acts of war this way. Not […]
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Swimming Against The Stream
Swimming against the stream and powerful tides of conventional thought and behavioural orthodoxy is the only way to ever do anything of enduring value or significance in life. It is also the hardest life to live. Authenticity and sincerity or conscientious adherence to your own values will cost you more in suffering and hardship than […]
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Imperfect Past
No flower is perfect. The flowers of memory are always more beautiful because they only ever live in imagination. In truth – all knowledge is of the past and in this moving moment we are never anchored upon reality so much as on an embellished fantasy and fading memory of sensation and experience. Such is […]
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Priceless Beauty
Not all beauty has a cost. It is the things, people and places which do not have any associated, attributed monetary measurement of worth that are the most valuable. This is why we are all, in general, so unhappy – we place value in altogether the wrong things. We spend our lives chasing meaningless token […]
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Fake news and disinformation…
The semi-autonomous self-propagation of fake news and disinformation suggests that cognitive hyper-extension in, through and as communications technologies is always and already biased towards the distribution of information over the quality or veracity of the content thus distributed. There is an asymmetry in the physics of complex information-processing systems and we are all, if quite […]
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Civilisation Collapse
You really have to wonder if senescence and potential (or probable and plausibly inevitable) catastrophic collapse is as necessary in this context as is the endless production of entropy as a corollary of complexity. Any specific system (or system of systems) can only ever maintain sustainable continuity through the offset and displacement of its own internal […]
We inhabit distributed sociopolitical information systems that play out logical symmetries (i.e. of mathematics, physics) through the transmission medium of aggregate human agency as behavioural (essentially cognitive) micro-systems of and as decision-making machines. Does the transmission medium (i.e. human agency, volition, free will) drive the system or does the system almost entirely and autonomously self-propagate […]
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Letters to Eternity
I went for another solitary afternoon walk today and discovered this small token of human affection attached to a lonely tree on the edge of some farmland in the hills not far from where I live. I’m not sure why anyone would leave this there, exposed to the elements and bound to suffer an inevitable […]
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2020 US Election: Democratic Entropy
We might all be quite surprised to one day discover that dissonance and entropy are irreducible properties of systems of social organisation, that the sustainable continuity of any socio-political (or economic) system is only ever really a measure of the extent to which it successfully negotiates this internal dissonance and/or offsets and displaces it as […]
Daedelus Kite 