Context: Landmine-hunting hero rat dies in Cambodia after stellar career Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Even more heroic, perhaps, for being entirely unaware of what they have done. Bravery not being the absence of fear but the courage to act in spite of it, this is a template – if entirely unrelated – […]
Context: Work is a False Idol Note: A newspaper article regarding the endemic failure of capitalism in China that is itself pay-walled and inaccessible seems suitably ironic as to leave hyper-linked here. It is interesting that this “movement” of self-propagating behavioural and information idioms or tropes might be rendered or interpreted as threatening to economic […]
There really is very little doubt that for all the magnificent intellectual achievements of science and culture, it is human stupidity that most forcefully compels history forwards and with which even our greatest accomplishments find themselves inextricably intertwined. From brutally selfish autocratic intransigence to unmanageably complex democratic dissonance, politics is not so much a comedy […]
As a species, we seem positively bound to cyclical, constructive inflation and reinvention of the artefacts, entities and cultural systems that quite naturally sediment in and as shared memory around such catastrophic historical episodes. The essence of history has been this headlong rush into cataclysmic violence, followed as denouement by much gentler growth and cultural […]
I don’t know if there’s life after death, but I do know that facing personal mortality would be a hell of a lot easier if there was some sense in which we could be certain that humanity was likely to persist in this Universe, that all of our lives and suffering as collective endeavour possesses […]
How do we resolve the central enigma of human existence? That problem is not that simple yet intractable fact of our own existence, mystifyingly beautiful and as ultimately puzzling as this may be. Nor is it that we invest such a vast amount of our limited individual and collective time blundering from one catastrophic, often […]
We might do better not to ask how, exactly, an entire country might become a kind of prison so much as to ask why it would be a large-scale governance framework that anyone would think was worthwhile pursuing. This is indeed a world in which such large-scale incarceration occurs and as such it is a […]
Why won’t people leave communities of poorly informed dissatisfaction? It is a curious and potentially intractable aspect of human psychology that the more untenable an ideological position, belief system or existential context, the harder it becomes to leave. Doubling down on a bad bet takes less energy than the potential effort required to extract one’s […]
I’m a disavowed “swipe left” in this world of manifest superficiality and instantaneous digital gratification; not much interested in the narcissistic hedonism of commercially-mediated myopia and all these profoundly narrow behavioural games and shallow conceptual vocabularies, I really am completely out of place here. Nevermind that all we ever do by embracing and chasing all […]
The general arc and trajectory of a pathology is rarely identified or recognised by those that inhabit it; this functional blind-spot is a partial representation of core cognitive factors that exist as much inter as intra individuals and in or as distributed ideologies. Notice, though, that the curious self-organisational resiliency of autonomously self-propagating (and entirely […]
Context: US Military Document Admits That Risk of Nuclear War Is Growing This article kind of ruined my Sunday, right there. The rank absurdity of nuclear war is astonishing. That the worlds and words built from effective abstractions of thought and the transient emotional affectations of partisan ideological difference could ever arrive in or at […]
Despite being quite well suited by geography and economy to weather the pandemic, it seems the inevitable has happened and – part epidemiological entropy, part selfish human stupidity, part bad luck – COVID-19 has gained a foothold again here in Australia. Every morning and several times a day I check the news media online to […]
Daedelus Kite 