It is not always immediately obvious but it remains as something of an irreducible fact that the variously self-branded dictators, imperialists and draconian autocrats of this world are really quite unintelligent. Yes, they may have many thousands of very clever individuals, organisations and institutions working on their behalf but the essence of their message and […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Meanwhile, and as China rapidly prepares to commit geoeconomic suicide, not even they have realised that it is the essential structure of a psychosis to cultivate such an effectively infantile relationship with the world in which the dependency upon confrontation and conquest forms the ideological core of their political narrative of self-identity. Even should they […]
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 […]
The gambler’s fallacy that doubling down on a bad bet will eventually recoup lost investments can be offset by realising a longer-term payoff in terms of territorial influence and power. Other than feeling a bit melancholy about the oppressed and serially, strategically misled and economically exploited peoples of these nations, I can not help but […]
A terrible mistake is about to be made in Ukraine. It is an act of anachronistic imperialism and thoughtless brutality to seek to invade another nation under a masquerade of being “one people” when the reciprocal costs to one’s own (actual) people are going to be so staggeringly vast and unrelenting. This is fundamentally a […]
Context: Work is a False Idol Note: A newspaper article regarding the endemic failure of capitalism in China that is itself pay-walled and inaccessible seems suitably ironic as to leave hyper-linked here. It is interesting that this “movement” of self-propagating behavioural and information idioms or tropes might be rendered or interpreted as threatening to economic […]
Situation: Political Leader A is threatening to invade Country B for asserted reasons of historical justice, retribution, pride or security. Explanation: Political Leader A is threatening to invade Country B in order to keep their own people in line. Creating a sense of fear and insecurity is a way to make people feel like they […]
Context: Chinese jets invade Taiwan airspace Good ideas sell themselves, it is only bad ideas that require brute-forcing. The CCP have painted themselves into a corner. The constructive dissonance of insecurity upon which their core ideological self-validation rests obligates them to an expansionist adversarialism that might fit well with their symbolic abstractions of attainment and […]
Context: Can SenseTime become a Chinese AI champion? Success here being defined as much by the extent to which a corporation becomes a compliant appendage of state control as by technical expertise. It’s a strange game – the control systems being fielded will gradually become the axioms of political power; what is successful as applications […]
Daedelus Kite 