Context: The Covid-19 Catastrophe; Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened – review An interesting article, skimmed, but honestly – we shouldn’t waste excess quantities of spilled ink or time on what is really quite a simple problem. That is: the grammars, games and mechanisms of political selection and government installation of and for […]
Category: politics
Twitter Tests Trump’s Tall Tales
Context: Trump threatens social media after Twitter puts warning on his false claims The dissonant entropy of salient adversarialism finds optimal self-replication through staccato bursts of semi-coherent linguistic superficiality and Twitter is a weapon of choice. If the primary medium of transmission could even plausibly be extinguished, an entire operating model and communications strategy (such […]
Coronavirus Inquiry Stand-off
Context: Coronavirus inquiry tensions leave WA farmers fearing more China tariffs after barley hit Nothing quite invokes trust as does authentic accountability and undifferentiated transparency. Questions as to the Global or regional presence or absence of such transparency are as fractious as they are important. The international society of states (such as it is) currently finds itself […]
Context: Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is Bogus I would usually just slide past this kind of topic without commenting. However, as an artefact in a vigorously-contested information environment – an observation to be made here is that even a document of dubious veracity serves a useful purpose above and […]
A strange property of systems of ideological or political thought is that they offer constitutively unclear or ambiguous paths between their declarative values and the end states they aspire to. Many Democracies (for instance) celebrate those generic Constitutional assertions constructed around the self-evident importance of free speech, freedom of assembly or various rights oriented towards […]
Ideology is a tool, a technology of descriptive (i.e. algorithmic) information compression and generalised (over-)simplification through which complex realities and observed facts are rendered comprehensible. Decisions, evaluations and strategic planning for continuity (of self, of organisations, of civilisation) are facilitated by compression. Having cultivated or procedurally-defined the conceptual boundaries and adaptive grammars of such systems […]
Brexit as a concept
To what extent can any nation (or ideology) ever successfully isolate itself without toxic consequence? Time’s arrow of cultural, technological metamorphosis is defined by a progressive sedimentation of connectivity, network edges; everything else is atavistic wish-fulfilment.
Democracy, unmasked…
…and this, this is the yawning abyss at the heart of Democracy; that is, it is a system so exquisitely poor at selecting individuals of sufficient aptitude, intelligence and enduring moral character to perform the roles into which they might find themselves unwittingly flung.
The strangest thing about all of our systems of governance, control and social maintenance is that it is in the very act(s) of attempting to create order that we must necessarily also generate disorder. The more components, moving parts and abstract logical relationships we introduce into the world, the more degrees of autonomous systemic and […]
A central problem of all political systems is that the idealised abstractions of those systems are of a fundamentally different kind or class of entity than are the lived experiences and material extension or implementation of those systems into, upon, through and as the world. There is a fundamental (and foundational) discontinuity between the material […]
Climate Strike: Which Economy?
I observed a characteristically parochial performance from a politician on the morning news today. The topic of the Global Climate Strike was under analysis and the tired old excuses for workers and schoolchildren not attending the rallies and protests were wobbled around with rhetorical ineptitude. An argument was made for the importance of a strong […]
It is a little hard not to feel somewhat dispossessed and saddened by the arc of catastrophe that human history traces in time. There is some essential adversarial turn in psychology and nature that provides and requires the entropy from which new forms of thought and life are able to emerge. We come to depend […]