Categories
Alien Anthropology

Russian Roullette: Strategic Void

Putin has mastered a political game of Machiavellian command and control, of surveillance and power but he remains quite clearly overwhelmed by the unmanageable complexities of the war he has invoked and inflicted as much upon his own people as upon the peoples of Ukraine and, through them, of the free world. The danger of […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Totalitarian Psychosis, Revisited

Context: ‘The Russians have started coming’: Finland considers tourist visa ban The curious thing about the autocratic regime reacting negatively to other nations taking rational actions against them (and their war) is that for all their sabre rattling and vigorous external finger-pointing, the difference and opposition they are creating is precisely the dissonance and turbulent […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Psychotic Dependency of Imperialist Ideology

Putin’s relationship with NATO possesses the essential characteristics of a pathological psychosis. He is so profoundly shaped by a narrative of fear and insecurity that he can not imagine (or influence) a world without it. He has in effect done everything in his power to ensure the continuity of the “threat” as reflexive self-validation for […]

Categories
humanity

The Spiral of F̶e̶a̶r Peace

The spiral of accelerating attention upon aggressive events and negative consequences has a tendency to reproduce itself much faster than positive, neutral or ideologically and geopolitically inconsequential acts and facts. Human brains are, for better and for worse, more precisely refined and tuned to react to (and obsess upon) the terrible possibilities and through it, […]

Categories
culture

Europe in Disarray

Negotiating the accelerating metamorphosis of systemic change is a problem of global salience which appears rather poorly catered for by the leviathan of legacy organisational and heuristic solutions.