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 […]
The trouble is that every path winds through a carnival of fools. Not because the world is malicious, but because the coordinates of sense are infinite, and what maps cleanly in one quadrant looks deranged in another. Language and habit do the dirty work—each person carrying their own system of signals, every encounter a clash […]
The rise of rigid ideology is a reciprocal function of the simplicity of the language with which it embellishes itself. This is not a moral judgement, nor an apologetic for autocracy, but a statistical inevitability: simplicity wins because simplicity persists. Such narratives are not the only dynamics at work, but they gain disproportionate attention. Words […]
If you think politics is the solution to a world deeply problematised by entropic gradients of political turbulence, you’re either an idiot or you’re evil. Politics doesn’t solve problems, it feeds on them. It sustains itself by displacement — shuffling costs, hiding contradictions, weaponising blame. Nothing fundamental ever changes because the system isn’t built to […]
The air is full of noise, but not much thought. Individually, people can be sharp, clever, kind. Put enough of us together and something else emerges: a soft median that drifts to the top like foam. Those who rise inside it are not the most intelligent, not the most insightful, but the ones who know […]
Context: More Dangerous’ Than Nukes—China And Russia Revealed To Be Suddenly Abandoning The U.S. Dollar For A Bitcoin, Ethereum And XRP-Inspired Rival Amid Crypto Price Pump. A cunning plan. I’m going to suggest that self-inflicted existential desperation makes strange bedfellows of technologies and autocrats. The strangest of all being the expected benefits of socioeconomic, cultural […]
A conspicuous absence of totalising metanarrative is a necessary condition for the efflorescing reproduction of the countless contemporary insecurities and partisan adversarialisms that masquerade as epistemological (or ideological) certainty and individuated self-determination. The absence of this binding property itself then becomes the binding property. In this way, the impossibility of logical or electromechanical (as infallibly […]
Successfully negotiating the resonant dissonance of any democracy is indeed deeply problematised by an obligation to successfully define, negotiate and evolve strategies with which to do so. I see the contemporary American problem as being on one hand unique and specific to a particular entanglement of histories, motivations, incentives and value (or belief) systems but […]
Context: US strategic policy in Taiwan needs to change as China shows it has capacity to take the island by force Interesting article but I have to wonder about the nature of the psychological factors and essentially pathological dependence of totalitarian ideologues upon the narratives and endless preparation for confrontation. More important than the actual […]
Much stranger than that such belligerent fury and reckless risk-taking exists is that it persists and returns (with uncanny frequency) in cyclic political episodes and internecine escapades to haunt humanity in the ways it quite clearly does. There is a recurring theme of totalitarian ideological dependency upon the trope and narrative fabrication of having suffered […]
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 […]
The essence of the paranoiac is in every act and thought to reproduce, invoke and justify the circumstances that generate their paranoia. To indicate a specific instance may be to miss the point. Being a generalised bias of identity, individuation and subjectivity – it is a global property that appears in and as culture, communication […]
Daedelus Kite 