Can Russia move on from Putin? I’d say that they have no choice. His business and political model is that of a 13th Century village chieftain. He is seeking to drag his own nation (and the world with it) back into some atavistic absurdity and kleptocratic tyrrany of brutality and darkness. If humanity and creative […]
Putin’s radiating cloud of unknowing (disinformation) serves another purpose. Not only is he seeking to serially mislead the long-suffering peoples of his nation, he is aspiring to ever more closely bind their subjective self-identities to the political fate of his ideological position. If the identities and corollary systems of belief of the people of a […]
I wonder at times if some nations are as dependent upon incompetence as they are upon extreme nationalist rhetoric. The point being that, in this instance, the harmonic resonance of these two emergent (as ideological) character traits has a tendency to endlessly and endemically orient their political system towards the production and self-validation of precisely […]
There really is little doubt that the political leadership in Moscow have entangled themselves in a monumentally catastrophic historical failure and no amount of extremist nationalistic rhetoric can free them from this mess or incentivise their own long-suffering people to free them. It is starting to become clear that this political class of kleptocratic psychopaths […]
Is it worth reflecting that the fear and insecurity this event generates within Russia is precisely the bread and butter of authoritarian self-validation. The Kremlin’s leadership has painted itself into to a lonely corner of brutalising isolation, futile alienation and haunted escalatory rhetoric. It has done so precisely because it knows no other way of […]
In all its forms, a totalitarian state is reflexively oriented towards and dependent upon the threat and insecurity that conflict and difference with Others represents. Even if they invade and conquer Taiwan, the Phillipines, Thailand and Indonesia – the Chinese regime is constitutively unable to cease its aggressive rhetoric and actions as every part of […]
Concrete evidence that the West does not have a monopoly on gullible fools. The question is, or becomes, are citizens in democracies or in totalitarian regimes more prone to dissociative conspiratorial narratives? Intuition suggests that it may be the totalitarian states that generate more compliant idiots but the greater freedoms of the West leave people […]
There are some failing metaphysical assumptions and troubled subjectivities in the notionally “Western” position and its attendant parochialisms. A drift through deterministic materialism and downstream mechanical (or algorithmic) thinking into untenable philosophical positions also seems somewhat inevitable, if perhaps not entirely irremediable. I am constantly fascinated (and yet to be quite honest also simultaneously horrified) […]
Those artefacts, entities and systems that percolate to ascendance in any particular organisational context tend to be as persistent, as suffocating and as self-interested as they are brittle and prone to catastrophic disassembly when encountering significant environmental perturbation. The diminishing returns on disruptive science are a function of an academic system that has undergone pathological […]
In a distributed, ubiquitous information space, everything (including this brief paragraph) is in play. While it is true that complex communications systems can (and do) have many centers of gravity, some of the interesting considerations here orbit a fact that the ascendant networks and platforms of information transmission maximally persist as a function of replicability, […]
Fiction as myth is humanity’s first form of collaborative, cultural self-simulation. Clear boundaries between systems of belief and proven facts might forever be intricately indeterminate but the power and consequence of fiction is unquestionable. The role and power of creative language and an unbounded (if pragmatic) technological imagination should never be misunderestimated. The speculative forecasting […]
Simultaneously admirable and fascinating, Ukrainian archivists are working hard to keep their language and culture safe. The language and written words by and through which human beings define their commonalities and cultural bonds of collaborative identity, as much as their resonant and dissonant differences, is unveiled as the treasure worth fighting for that it has […]
Daedelus Kite 