Categories
Alien Anthropology

Building Peace

Curiouser and curiouser: observe how an aspiration to coordinate or construct and administratively or diplomatically assert peace becomes itself yet another game and grammar of difference, of competition, of jockeying words, behavioural idioms, contested concepts and roles; exclusive and self-sustaining as a professional career or community of experts which, while the endeavour is nominally admirable, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Rethinking (is) Philosophy

Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]

Categories
communication

The Consolation of Etymology: Pugilistic Spell-Checkers

I am engaged in an unrelenting death-match of Greco-Roman wrestling with mobile device spell checkers. I have had some very near-misses on social media. The spell checker on my phone recently tried to insert Gestapo instead of gestalt and circumcision instead of circumlocution; needless to say – this would have dramatically re-framed the intended meaning […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Freedom Game

Freedom of Self is a game we play in which we trade an Other’s control for our own.  In all the sparkle and fireworks of our relentless jubilation we fail to recognise that we still play by the same rules and are in essence no more free than we were before. Additionaly: we free to […]

Categories
communication culture Philosophy

Ex Nihilo

Only nothing comes from nothing and only nothing is effortlessly produced…