Categories
politics

Meaningless Political Babble: Communication at Scale

At the limit lies bullshit: language sufficiently detached from external constraint that its capacity to provoke another cycle of response becomes more important than what it describes.

Categories
politics

political philosophy’s hidden assumption: the person

Political science inherits the person from philosophy without explaining it.

Categories
politics

the trouble with monoculture

Culture survives because it changes. A culture that cannot change is not being preserved. It is being embalmed.

Categories
money

wealth drag

Wealth is usually treated as evidence that society is working. But extreme accumulation may also reveal something stranger: a system increasingly organised around preserving wealth, whether or not that preservation still serves the world around it.

Categories
money

cold comfort for change

The problem is that we built a housing system increasingly organised around speculation and then act surprised when some of its casualties become impossible to ignore.

Categories
politics

adaptation: fixing aussie politics

There is no final closure. No permanent certainty. No government that fixes everything forever. There are only systems that adapt well and systems that adapt badly.

Categories
politics

better politics

The task is not to create perfect agreement, but to maintain enough shared coherence that a society can continue solving problems without tearing itself apart.

Categories
politics

the reflecting pool reflects back

The Reflecting Pool turned green. Perhaps it is simply doing its job.

Categories
politics

populism down under

The appeal of populism is that it makes complexity feel unnecessary. The cost is usually discovered much later.

Categories
politics

australia, please…

Populists tell you they’re going to smash the system for your benefit. Funny how it still always seems to end with the rich getting richer, the government getting worse, and everyone else paying for the repairs.

Categories
politics

political speed-dating down under: the golden bulldozer

Australia’s political speed-dating with One Nation suggests that what has happened in the USA is not an exception, it is a franchised political method.

Categories
politics

please explain: xenophobia

Xenophobia does not stop a changing world. It converts psychological vulnerability into political power.