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 […]
Context: Geopolitics is for losers It is always worth considering the extent to which the longer frequency waves as oscillating ebb and tide of history are also those of the communications systems, of the languages and self-validating dialects of ideologically-inflected political narrative. The kinds of ideological and political system that tend to emerge as convergent […]
Context: World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life I have been deep down a rabbit hole of seeking to apply these complexity thinking insights more broadly for the last few years. One key, kernel and core takeaway is that (we) human beings seem on the whole quite poorly equipped […]
The curious thing about those who seek to leverage political capital from conflict is that this represents an atavistic ideological “business model” that in such a deeply interdependent world, all actions and aggressions return – amplified – to the actor. Even more so, in such an intricately entangled social, economic and technological context in which […]
Paraphrasing what Hemingway wrote on the topic of bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises”, it seems that the descent into totalitarianism occurs first gradually, then suddenly.
It represents a strange and yet sadly common symmetry of politics and ideology that while the chaotically effervescing freedoms of a real world’s media and information systems find the totalitarian state almost entirely impermeable to difference or diversity and truth, the unrepentantly fictional narratives of deception and misdirection broadcast by the totalitarian quite easily emanate […]
The gambler’s fallacy that doubling down on a bad bet will eventually recoup lost investments can be offset by realising a longer-term payoff in terms of territorial influence and power. Other than feeling a bit melancholy about the oppressed and serially, strategically misled and economically exploited peoples of these nations, I can not help but […]
Daedelus Kite 