Tag: fascism

Categories
cybernetics

Meaning: Uncertainty Disco

Meaning does not exist in words, ideas, or intentions taken in isolation. It arises from a relational system in which elements acquire significance only through their differences from one another over time. Words are defined by other words; references defer to further references; interpretation always lags expression. That lag is not an accident or a […]

Categories
cybernetics

Metabolic Power

Modern power does not stabilise disorder. It metabolises it. At planetary scale, technological and financial systems do not merely respond to uncertainty. They generate specific instabilities that make their own interventions appear necessary, then present themselves as the most probable remedy. This is not a claim about intent. It is a structural tendency of adaptive […]

Categories
cybernetics

Merry Griftmas

Across the United States, and increasingly across comparable political systems, authoritarian grift has consolidated with remarkable speed. It is disproportionately financed, protected, and normalised by extreme concentrations of wealth. The alignment is not driven by ideological sophistication, intelligence, or long-term strategy. It is driven by extraction. Ultra-rich actors pursue deregulation, tax minimisation, labour suppression, and […]

Categories
politics

Stupid Ideas

Immigration isn’t the real fault line. It’s just the surface where deeper cracks show up. When politicians point at newcomers and cry “problem,” what spills out isn’t danger from outside but the mess they’ve made inside: weak services, insecure jobs, and a social fabric stretched to snapping. Blaming immigrants becomes the shortcut for leaders who […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Unsustainable States of America

Authoritarian consolidation does not appear out of nowhere; it emerges as a systemic reconfiguration under stress. In the American case, its acceleration is not an anomaly but the result of institutional brittleness, economic concentration, and communicative distortion. What distinguishes the current dynamic is its self-amplifying character: once initiated, it builds on itself, hollowing democratic resilience […]

Categories
politics

Fascism Redux: Brittle, Brutal, Broken

The more you blame others, the more afraid you become. The more afraid you become, the more you need to blame others. Blame draws breath: inhale the fear of others, exhale the accusation that keeps it alive. The cycle is seductive because it feels like control—naming enemies, drawing lines, standing strong—but what sustains it is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Belief Bingo: Gullibility Disco

You are being played. Not in the sense of your particular beliefs, nor in the details of what you hold to be true, but in the very act of belief itself. The machinery at work here operates on the substrate of meaning, on the automatic reflex that orients you towards conviction, significance, and sense-making. What […]

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
history

Fascism as Fear: Nazi Persecution of the Disabled

Context: The First into the dark (link to pdf) Fascism as acute and pathological fear of otherness is perhaps nowhere so clearly illustrated as an interrogation of these facts reveal. I do wonder if the identification of historical horrors at times causes us to distance ourselves from them, even as we warily unveil and as […]

Categories
Philosophy

Fascism

Context: The World of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz – The New York Review There is “a certain orientation of life toward death” that forms the basis and existential kernel of a pathology that transcribes the arc and trajectory of (an) industrialised or mechanised rationality that in being (or becoming) aspirationally unbounded from the consequences of its […]

Categories
Philosophy

Dark Star

It’s true that evolution proceeds iteratively and adds layer upon layer of complex utility to bodies, brains and to the disembodied behavioural systems recorded in and as culture or language and technology. Notice, however, that there is a certain threshold of confirmation and communication complexity at which entire nations, civilisations find themselves reverting to baser […]

Categories
Philosophy

Sic Semper Tyrannis

The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]