You should see (or intuitively feel) how shame is a trap, a labyrinth of pure abstraction and emotionally-infused imagination or half-blind fear that no rational or intelligent person should ever become ensnared by and yet we just can’t help ourselves and so easily and serially drift through regret into pity and – often enough – […]
There really is very little doubt that for all the magnificent intellectual achievements of science and culture, it is human stupidity that most forcefully compels history forwards and with which even our greatest accomplishments find themselves inextricably intertwined. From brutally selfish autocratic intransigence to unmanageably complex democratic dissonance, politics is not so much a comedy […]
Situation: Political Leader A is threatening to invade Country B for asserted reasons of historical justice, retribution, pride or security. Explanation: Political Leader A is threatening to invade Country B in order to keep their own people in line. Creating a sense of fear and insecurity is a way to make people feel like they […]
The essence of an authoritarian political theory of control is one of identifying, generating or a fabricating difference by and through which subjectivities and identities can be manipulated through the recursive shaping of a self-validating insecurity. This is also why empire building becomes dependent upon a fear that eventually consumes and destroys itself. It is […]
We might do better not to ask how, exactly, an entire country might become a kind of prison so much as to ask why it would be a large-scale governance framework that anyone would think was worthwhile pursuing. This is indeed a world in which such large-scale incarceration occurs and as such it is a […]
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 […]
Context: Comment la Russie a passé une décennie à affaiblir les libertés sur Internet All aspiration to total control leads to irreconcilable paradoxes and dissolution. The threat beyond is equated to the threat within and reflexively reproduces an ideological narrative (and political justification) for systems of control that are so dependent upon the difference and […]
Memory is neither friend nor foe and when we find ourselves afraid of the past or a suffering that still lives within us we often as reflex seek to fight it, but in pushing, rejecting, setting ourselves against a painful memory or experience that is perhaps so visceral and intimate that it incorporates and becomes […]
Facing reality has always been my most unpalatable responsibility and were it not a necessary burden to attempt to bear to merely survive and play all these hollow games of meaningless repetition that this world incurs, I would have stopped trying many years ago. But survive we must and if in so doing this means […]
It is not all but certainly many if not most men that seek to make little gods of themselves. In so doing, they seek to be praised and treasured but when this fails to occur they generally set about conquering their world, their families and (the extended family of) their nations as some immodest compensation […]
Context: US Military Document Admits That Risk of Nuclear War Is Growing This article kind of ruined my Sunday, right there. The rank absurdity of nuclear war is astonishing. That the worlds and words built from effective abstractions of thought and the transient emotional affectations of partisan ideological difference could ever arrive in or at […]
Context: Early humans were sheltered from worst effects of volcanic supereruption Human culture is in effect a shared memory and transient security blanket that rarely sees (or reflexively, defensively – chooses to see) very far past the half-mirrored, labyrinthine self-reflection that a dream-like consensus reality and the hyper-extended cognition of technology must always and ultimately […]
Daedelus Kite 