Categories
politics

Writing on Politics

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Strange Days

What strikes me most about the current president of the United States is a strange inversion that would be almost comic if it were not so consequential. He shows little regard for the role he occupies, scant respect for the law, and no evident commitment to the country beyond what it can deliver to him […]

Categories
Philosophy

Moral Inversion

Nietzsche’s The Antichrist was not written to identify a villain in the conventional sense. It was an intervention aimed at disturbing complacency. His target was not a person, but a reversal: a situation in which values publicly affirmed as moral, spiritual, or redemptive had become detached from the practices and dispositions they purported to sanctify. […]

Categories
Philosophy

Structural Insecurity Precedes Moral Failure

Racism, misogyny, and other forms of exclusion recur not because they are compelling, justified, or desirable, but because large-scale social systems are biased toward generating them, or things like them, under stress. Calling this structural does not mean denying choice. People do make choices, good, bad, and ugly, and they live with the consequences of […]

Categories
cybernetics

Technocratic Tyrrany

We use technologies that also use us. Over time, methods are formalised into metrics, metrics are stabilised into categories of meaning, and tools designed to assist begin to define which actions are recognised as valid. What once supported activity becomes background infrastructure. The tools move to the centre. Human experience no longer anchors them; it […]

Categories
cybernetics

Why an Autocratic Turn is Catastrophic

An autocratic turn accelerates self-destructive collapse not because it is immoral, but because it forces a distributed system into a shape it cannot sustain. Short-term unity is purchased by suppressing variation, and the centre begins to confuse resistance with disobedience rather than information about system limits. Feedback from courts, states, agencies, markets, and elections is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Teresa Brennan: Philosophy of Affect

Teresa Brennan was an Australian feminist philosopher whose work crossed psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory, frequently placing her at odds with academic orthodoxy. She challenged dominant Lacanian interpretations by insisting that affect is not a linguistic effect or private feeling but a materially transmissible force that moves between bodies and across institutions. This stance drew […]

Categories
cybernetics

Polarisation

Public opinion in the United States increasingly seems to fall into a familiar pattern. Not a rule, not a law, and not a permanent split, but a recurring tendency. Roughly half the population appears to think that what is happening is not acceptable. Roughly a third seems broadly comfortable with it. The rest are harder […]

Categories
cybernetics

Executive Signals

The United States of America is not in trouble because of a hidden plan, a dominant ideology, or a small set of unusually powerful individuals. What is unfolding is a systemic condition in which behaviour is selected by how well it propagates, not by how well it understands. The field is loud, unstable, and visibly […]

Categories
cybernetics

Alignment

It has probably always been the case that seeking respite from the endless surge of unhinged political stupidity feels futile, exasperating, and frightening. Watching poorly understood belief systems grind on, reproducing themselves through humanity as distributed patterns of alignment within the communicative field rather than arising from deliberate, individual choice, is unsettling. The fear comes […]

Categories
cybernetics

Duplicity

What is striking is not simply how difficult it is for people with genuine insight, intellectual range, and openness to rise through status hierarchies, but that those hierarchies stabilise themselves by filtering out precisely the signals that would correct them. This is not accidental. Systems that persist must dampen information that threatens coherence, even when […]

Categories
humanity life

Disability Support

Disability is not an edge case that happens to someone else. It is a statistical certainty built into biology and time. Unless a life ends early, bodies age, systems degrade, injuries accumulate, genetics express themselves, and cognition changes. This is not moral failure or personal deficiency. It is physics. Entropy at the level of lived […]