Categories
politics

Putin can not control the wildfire he has started

There really is little doubt that the political leadership in Moscow have entangled themselves in a monumentally catastrophic historical failure and no amount of extremist nationalistic rhetoric can free them from this mess or incentivise their own long-suffering people to free them. It is starting to become clear that this political class of kleptocratic psychopaths […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Extinction of Humanity?

You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Ignoring Global Catastrophic Risk

Context: Why do we ignore catastrophic risk? It may just be that some entities, artefacts, events or (other) possibilities are so vast and so horrifying that they all but entirely invalidate the limited linguistic or cognitive referential frame(s) of this comforting little semiotic cocoon of complex tautologies and half-mirrored surfaces within which we (all) live. […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

COVID19 and Global Economic Devastation

Beyond the self-evident inadequacies of our integrated bureaucratic hierarchies, the labyrinth of systemic biases which have funneled wealth into corporate welfare and monopolistic hegemonies are now revealing their utter ineptitude at providing adequate socioeconomic resilience. You could ask why no one saw this coming. Many people did, they just did not know what shape or […]

Categories
environment

Climate Change In Security: Insecurity

It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat – to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition – carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material, […]

Categories
technology

Technology is a double-edged sword

Double-edged swords are the rule, rather than the exception, it seems and it is in general a monumental communications failure that risks and vulnerabilities are not sufficiently (publicly) acknowledged and appropriately managed.  Should technology creators be held responsible for the potential disorder and malfeasance to which their products and technologies are applied? Notwithstanding the economic […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

One Planet: a Smoke Signal in this Warming World

Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Climate Change: “Is this really how it all ends ?”

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Worst-Case Climate Scenario is Occurring

Don’t be fooled into a false sense of security by the fact that a worst-case climate apocalypse is intimately terrifying on a scale exceeding any story that humanity ever told itself and is so far beyond our limited experience that we more readily characterise it as myth or fiction. At the scale of disaster we […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Amazon Inferno

The Amazon is burning and with it is going humanity’s hope of holding back the worst consequences of Global climate change.

Categories
culture Philosophy Science

Catastrophy Beyond Imagination

Some dawning realities are so vast that we do not even have words, let alone cognitive methods, to characterise or represent them. Climate Change is one of these realities.