Categories
life

A Sea of Troubles

The world is hard enough as it stands. We all carry burdens, and most of us will eventually stumble under the weight of physical decline, mental strain, or spiritual confusion. That is the shared condition—problems are not optional. Yet there is a difference between carrying those burdens and becoming a burden; between being flawed and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ordinary Evil

History shows that evil is often less a grand design than the byproduct of ordinary negligence. Hannah Arendt called it the “banality of evil” — Eichmann sending millions to death not out of demonic hatred but bureaucratic obedience. Psychologists like Stanley Milgram demonstrated how everyday people, given orders, would administer lethal shocks rather than resist […]

Categories
politics

An Idiot’s Mandate

From outside the United States, the Republican Party’s collapse into moral and intellectual bankruptcy is not just a domestic farce—it’s a global hazard. They’ve thrown their weight behind Donald Trump, a conman who turns every institution he touches into a casino of self-interest and spectacle. This isn’t leadership; it’s theatre for idiots, and the actors […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Watching the World burn

The world’s on fire and everyone’s selling marshmallows. I’m sitting here, half in disbelief, half in deja vu, watching the carnival of catastrophe roll on like it’s just another Tuesday. People are making obscene amounts of money monetising distraction, denial, and dopamine, while whole populations are quietly erased beneath the algorithmic rug. It’s not just […]

Categories
Philosophy

Fear

The aesthetic liberation of the depiction of the impossible is found in representational systems such as languages and narratives, which are unified by their inability to represent anything beyond their own tautological interfaces. The entity that embodies horror most powerfully is not the tangible evils of the world, but rather the absence of unambiguous truth […]

Categories
Philosophy

Some days…

…some days, I’d like to just gather up all the tyrants, the warlords and the dictators and seal them in a glass sphere before launching it across the event horizon of a black hole. Beyond the staggering complexity and as yet non-existent infrastructure for such an arguably defensible act, it remains as a conceptually simple […]

Categories
Philosophy

Evil

When encountering the serially haunted futility of so much of our species’ belligerently selfish behavioural vocabulary, I often resort to an attempted witty quip to the effect that this is, yet again and quite simply, “human beings being human”. It is not after all as though most who conduct themselves in variously disgraceful ways have […]

Categories
culture

On never forgetting…

I found this photograph completely randomly recently. It is of a 9 year old girl on a train bound for Auschwitz- Birkenau. The “girl with a headscarf” was Anna Maria Steinbach. The scarf covered her (now) short-cropped hair. The girl was murdered by gas in July 1944. We can never forget the horrors of fascism […]

Categories
technology

Machine Intelligence as Criminal Mastermind?

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ethical Impropriety

Ethical frameworks are those guiding principles within which we are free to make moral choices. The extent to which our choices align to the semantic intentions of any particular ethical framework is a definition and declaration of our adherence, conformity or alignment to it. Notice, however, that the majority of ethical frameworks we encounter do […]

Categories
Philosophy

Ethics and Power

Power is really an inverse function of ethics. What is considered permissible or (indeed) valuable under any moving ethical frame of reference is implicitly – some would argue necessarily – representative of the power structures, systems and integrated social, political and ideological modalities of a time and place. Notice also that what is considered good […]

Categories
Philosophy

Will AI superintelligence be evil?

The question might be not as to if or when General AI successfully transcends human intellect, but rather – what is it about the culture, competition and commercial (or, to be frank, geostrategic and complex adversarial) contexts in which these technologies currently effervesce and thrive that might only ever guarantee that they are shaped from, […]