Categories
culture

The Achilles’ Heel of Totalitarian Adversarialism

Context: US strategic policy in Taiwan needs to change as China shows it has capacity to take the island by force Interesting article but I have to wonder about the nature of the psychological factors and essentially pathological dependence of totalitarian ideologues upon the narratives and endless preparation for confrontation. More important than the actual […]

Categories
communication Complexity culture

On Influencing Others

Context: Influencing the mind of an adversary It really makes me wonder what the future (or present) utility of statistical approaches combining neurobiological feedback orchestrated or forecasted through and as machine learning might be. The commercial extraction of utility through social media via algorithmic abbreviation and influence is clearly just such a practice. These brains […]

Categories
environment Philosophy

Dead Heat: Climate

Context: Climate change: 2020 in a dead heat for world’s warmest year Climate change has been off the radar for a while, it seems and while the shit-show and train-wreck of 2020 rolls on into 2021, there are some things which seem painfully obvious to me but which also, for whatever reason, seem to be […]

Categories
Psychology

Partisan Pathology

There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]

Categories
culture

Things fall apart…

Perhaps “the centre cannot hold” because there is no centre. Chaos and disorder are far more the native state of material (thermodynamic, dissipative) facts than are the projected order and control around which we reflexively and aspirationally self-validate. Curious, indeed, (and under one perspective) that everything emerging out of the complexity sciences suggests that it […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Money

Money is the crux of our shared existential crisis – and yes, regardless of the extent to which you are willing or able to admit this: it is a crisis, it is ongoing and it is the status of any adaptive system that is subject to an evolving momentum through entropy towards complexity. We store […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Psychological Physics of Fakes

Fakes fly faster and further than facts for pretty much the same reasons that it is easier to break stuff than to make it: entropy. It’s not a long stretch of the intellect, imagination or of verifiable observational experience to perceive that, given a platform and a digital device, any wingnut with an axe to […]

Categories
culture

The Implicit Resilience of (a) Limited Cognitive Dissonance

Narrative dissonance is a necessary component of social communication; an autonomous method for introducing the useful information entropy of difference through which biological, cognitive and cultural systems evolve and maintain resilience against catastrophic disassembly.  This difference has become acute, amplified by technology and it’s consequences have all but shredded political civility.