Cruelty grows through small, rational choices that make power easier to preserve and other people easier to discard.
Tag: cruelty
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Kindness
No, Elon, empathy is not the weakness of civilisation. Kindness, compassion, and mutual care are the conditions that make civilisation possible at all. Large-scale cooperation, cultural continuity, and institutional complexity do not emerge from fear, dominance, or competition. They emerge from trust, reciprocity, and the slow accumulation of relational stability. Without these, society collapses back […]
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Social Media: Entropic Confusion
When rolling two six-sided dice, the number seven is most likely not because it is special, but because probability clusters toward the middle. Out of 36 possible combinations, six add to seven, more than any other sum. This is entropy in miniature: the system naturally drifts toward its centre, not by design or meaning, but […]
Analysis is always double-edged. To describe how a system functions is also to provide a how-to, a cookbook for replication. You don’t need to intend it. The moment you show how the parts connect, you’ve revealed the pattern, and anyone watching can use that knowledge to tighten the loop. This isn’t limited to ideology or […]
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Ex Ordine Chaos
The air is full of noise, but not much thought. Individually, people can be sharp, clever, kind. Put enough of us together and something else emerges: a soft median that drifts to the top like foam. Those who rise inside it are not the most intelligent, not the most insightful, but the ones who know […]
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Rage Against the Trolls
Context: Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us I do wonder if the adversarial and tribal biases that so readily percolate through (for instance, but not only) online social networks have a tendency to reflexively cultivate and incentivise a bundle of pathological personality traits. In this sense, the technologically-mediated self-propagation of inflammatory and provocative narrative […]
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The King that Fell
Imagine, if you will, a king. A mighty ruler, a keen follower of Machiavelli and thus feared much more than loved and very clever indeed. Of course, being clever is only ever measured by the breadth and depth in which intelligence is defined and this king had come to live in a half-mirrored world of […]
Context: The Criminal Potential of Artificial Intelligence Beyond autonomous cybernetic system as tool or aperture of adversarial vulnerability lies the distinct possibility of AI as malevolent criminal mastermind. Notwithstanding the current paucity of anything even vaguely resembling Artificial General Intelligence, and regardless of our best (and worst) aspirations to benchmark and bootstrap this technology into […]
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Innocence
It makes me angry that the most beautiful souls are always first to perish and in their suffering we witness an enduring twilight of innocence in this world. As though it was not enough that all the hollow devils so enthusiastically vandalise the thread-bare tapestry of what remains of their own toxic hearts, they find […]
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Caged Flowers Blossom
Flowers can never know that they must always be enslaved in a cage of their own entangled branches and upon encountering some other cruelty they ever assume it as their own; in this way chained dark and anxious sorrows masquerade as freedom while blossoms held in shadow might still sweet innocence bloom. It is we […]
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Kind Heart, Cruel World…
It takes more strength to be kind that it ever takes to be cruel but this world positively incentivises and encourages adversarial competition, cruelty and aggression. I seem to have inadvertently found myself on the wrong planet…
