Categories
politics

Bad News Bears: Populism in Australia

Tyrranical ignorance resurfaces not as a national quirk but as a communicative phenomenon: as complexity scales, systems collapse toward simpler signals — not because simplicity is true, but because it is what travels fastest and replicates most easily. Influence accrues to those who reduce the world to the fewest moving parts. What we’re living through […]

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politics

Barnaby’s Choice

Barnaby Joyce’s sprint into One Nation marks a shift from policy argument to performance theatre. It is not a conversion so much as a wager: that in a crowded media field the shortest message wins. One Nation’s platform thrives on what could be called ideological constipation — gripping a few ideas so tightly they can […]

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politics

Stupid Ideas

Immigration isn’t the real fault line. It’s just the surface where deeper cracks show up. When politicians point at newcomers and cry “problem,” what spills out isn’t danger from outside but the mess they’ve made inside: weak services, insecure jobs, and a social fabric stretched to snapping. Blaming immigrants becomes the shortcut for leaders who […]

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politics

Hapless Fools

An autocratic turn rarely needs a mastermind. It grows in the fog between ambition and incompetence — statistical drift, not Machiavellian design. Greedy arrogance saturates every tier of (pretty much every) bureaucratic administration, but the deeper engine and self-propagating rationale is ashen banality: people who mistake obedience for insight, who follow momentum because they cannot […]

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politics

Bingo

Democracy is often assumed to be more resilient than it is. What is becoming clear in the United States is that its very openness—the freedoms of speech, assembly, and communication—provide the leverage points through which anti-democratic forces operate. If democratic systems can be bent or flipped using relatively low energy—disinformation campaigns, procedural manipulation, networked mobilization—then […]

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politics

Cookbook Dynamics: Critical Analysis Provides Strategic Playbooks to ‘Bad Actors’

Analysis is always double-edged. To describe how a system functions is also to provide a how-to, a cookbook for replication. You don’t need to intend it. The moment you show how the parts connect, you’ve revealed the pattern, and anyone watching can use that knowledge to tighten the loop. This isn’t limited to ideology or […]

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politics technology

The Engine of Tyranny

Blame draws breath. Inhale the fear of other people. Exhale the accusation that keeps the fear alive. Each cycle promises control—naming enemies, drawing boundaries, standing strong—but strength here is a mask. What passes for rebellion only generates new codes, new rituals, new obligations. Rules always return, harsher and more brittle, precisely because they are denied. […]

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politics

Fascism Redux: Brittle, Brutal, Broken

The more you blame others, the more afraid you become. The more afraid you become, the more you need to blame others. Blame draws breath: inhale the fear of others, exhale the accusation that keeps it alive. The cycle is seductive because it feels like control—naming enemies, drawing lines, standing strong—but what sustains it is […]

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politics

Sound and Fury: Political Futility

If you think politics is the solution to a world deeply problematised by entropic gradients of political turbulence, you’re either an idiot or you’re evil. Politics doesn’t solve problems, it feeds on them. It sustains itself by displacement — shuffling costs, hiding contradictions, weaponising blame. Nothing fundamental ever changes because the system isn’t built to […]

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politics

Politics

The problem isn’t which side of the political argument one takes. The problem is that it remains an argument at all. The very form of endless contestation—framed as positions, sides, and oppositions—sustains itself by never resolving. Institutions then become less about their supposed purpose—education, governance, justice, health—and more about reproducing the argument as their mode […]

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cybernetics politics

Triggered, Tripped and Trapped (in America)

Complex systems persist by inhabiting, invoking, sustaining nonlinear properties, where strict predictability collapses into fragility but feedback loops and fluctuating adaptations sustain continuity. Non-linearity here is less a mathematical technicality than an ontological geometry: the system thrives on unpredictability, dispersing shocks across distributed pathways and drawing from entropy itself as both constraint and medium. This […]

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politics

After Trump

At some point, Trump will be gone. The man will vanish from the stage, but the field that made him possible will remain. That’s the real danger—confusing the collapse of a figure with the collapse of the system that sustained them. Without structural change, the vacancy will simply pull another body into the same orbit. […]