Categories
cybernetics

The Field of War

The overarching domain is the total surface where every system shapes every other, a fused topology forming a singular systems surface in which no boundary is clean and no action is local. It is the ensemble of intersecting, interdependent systemic surfaces whose shifting pressures generate the forces mistaken for, and interpreted as, discrete events. Holism […]

Categories
Philosophy

On Not Pulling the Pin

The recurring tension over Taiwan is often described as a clash of policies, alliances, red lines or historical claims. But at a structural level it behaves more like a maintained gradient in a communicative field. Large national identities do not simply persist by consensus or memory. They require articulated vectors – directions of tension that […]

Categories
Philosophy

l.c.d. dictation

It’s not always obvious, but it’s grimly consistent: most dictators and autocrats aren’t clever—they’re just willing to be cruel. A few have enough low cunning to seize a moment or twist a system, but intelligence isn’t the driver. It’s laziness, brutality, and the fact that violence is the fastest shortcut to power if you don’t […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Peace

When reduced to its essence, the simplicity of global conflict is as horrifying as it is absurd.

Categories
Philosophy

Seeding Entropy

Context: China’s spy threat is growing, but the West has struggled to keep up …oh yes, and we might also ask: to what extent is the burbling, percolating insecurity of incessant intrusion, theft and deceptive misdirection actually a necessary and sustaining precondition for the continuity of a constitutively repressive political system? Is the invocation, cultivation and […]

Categories
environment

Ladakh Climate Protest

Thousands are protesting in Ladakh, India, demanding constitutional provisions to protect the region’s ecology and autonomy over land and agriculture decisions. The region, affected by climate change and territorial disputes, is seeing worsened conditions due to militarisation. Activist Sonam Wangchuk is leading a “climate fast” in freezing temperatures to highlight these issues. The protesters seek statehood and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Autocratic Bitcoin?

Context: More Dangerous’ Than Nukes—China And Russia Revealed To Be Suddenly Abandoning The U.S. Dollar For A Bitcoin, Ethereum And XRP-Inspired Rival Amid Crypto Price Pump. A cunning plan. I’m going to suggest that self-inflicted existential desperation makes strange bedfellows of technologies and autocrats. The strangest of all being the expected benefits of socioeconomic, cultural […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Extraterrestrial Treaty

The first nation to engage in a treaty to leverage a learning relationship with an extraterrestrial civilisation shall likely find themselves so vastly overwhelmed by intelligence, technology and (all associated, downstream) complexity that they might later wish they had simply stayed in a cave sharpening the pointy sticks with which humans are so prone to […]

Categories
politics

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 […]

Categories
freedom Philosophy

A Blank Sheet of Paper

A blank sheet of paper, indeed. In the Tao Te Ching (“Way of Life”), Lao Tze wrote of the ways in which the void and vacuum which is always an absent presence represents the anchor of life, of experience and freedom. The hole in the wheel is that which makes it useful; the absence in […]

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
Alien Anthropology

Storm clouds over Taipei, the psychology of Xi

Much stranger than that such belligerent fury and reckless risk-taking exists is that it persists and returns (with uncanny frequency) in cyclic political episodes and internecine escapades to haunt humanity in the ways it quite clearly does. There is a recurring theme of totalitarian ideological dependency upon the trope and narrative fabrication of having suffered […]