Drift into political extremity represents the ascendance of anachronistic narrative banality masquerading as novelty, significance and exceptionalism.
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Political Drift
Category: politics
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The Sleep of Reason
Is America sleepwalking into tyrrany? El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Context: How far would Trump go? I’m really very grateful that I live in a democracy that is not, currently at least, painfully and publicly disassembling itself.
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Ideological Fortresses
Political positions and ideological fortresses are grounded in the need for and dependence upon antitheses. What may be less obvious is that a communications system signal as gradient of ideological difference embodied in adversarial geopolitics is only ever reproduced in and amplified by that competition. Like the ouroboros, it feeds upon the long tail of […]
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Donald Trump is an Accident of History
Assuring democratic continuity may be problematised by the presence of this particular political personality in ways that (perhaps necessarily) distract us from tackling underlying causal factors. If it wasn’t this problematic character, it would be someone else and regardless of how this situation plays out; what are the large-scale causal dynamics here? Is the demagogic […]
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Rattling Sabers over the South China Sea
That the incompetent actions of one person can spark a global conflagration is a matter of the utmost absurdity. This indicates a failure of the intellect so rampantly oblivious to consequences as to be rightly-called “remedial”. On a broader scale, just what does the historical record reveal about the catastrophic fate of autocratic systems that […]
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Dictator 101
Raise the stakes, escalate, brutalise and threaten war but never, ever actually start a full-scale unrestrained conflict. Nothing so certainly disassembles dictatorial regimes as a blind leap into armed conflict and imperialist aggression. Sure, none of us will ever miss any of these unrepentant misanthropes but how few of them ever learn from the historical […]
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Advanced Persistent Trolls
Generative AI is itself an amplification from and product of the kinds of dissonant #entropy that actors engaged in “hack and deceive” are seeking to leverage, even if only transiently or in passing as a function of larger #competitive systems. Advanced Persistent Trolls are themselves likely a temporary #communications systems coefficient, in the longer run. Automation at scale will accelerate far […]
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 […]
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Language Makes Tyrants
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 […]
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Political Chaos
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 […]
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The Descent
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.
Daedelus Kite 