Identity formation requires antithesis. In the United States, political coherence has long been organised around opposition: liberty against tyranny, democracy against monarchy, capitalism against communism, freedom against control. These oppositions carved boundaries that stabilised national identity, generated purpose, and coordinated collective action. Opposition was not incidental. It was structural. Without it, American identity would have […]
Australia works because it stays balanced. Its democracy is not built on simple agreement, but on the disciplined interaction between different ways of seeing the world. Labor and Liberal are not just rival teams. Together, they form the smallest political structure capable of holding a complex society together. Two sides generate debate, correction, and restraint. […]
Writing about contemporary politics, especially what is now unfolding globally and with particular intensity in the United States, has become an aesthetically risky and expressively constricted act. Insight itself is treated as partisan. Intelligence, systems thinking, and even basic factual literacy are read as “progressive” positions regardless of intent or content. This is not simply […]
It is possible to speak about what is often labelled fascism without centring moral judgement, and instead treat it as a systemic configuration whose failure follows from structural incompatibility rather than ethical evaluation. Moral objections may be justified, but they are not what makes this form unsustainable. The failure arises from how such a configuration […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Daedelus Kite 