Context: China bans ‘sissy’ and ‘effeminate’ men under new macho media rules Ironically, K-Pop as a well-honed media-industrial mechanism captures a near-military efficiency in the production of image, (commercial) influence and self-propagating information artefacts that any authoritarian state would surely be proud to call its own. Propaganda falls over precisely where (and when) it attempts […]
Tag: pathology
Context: Chinese jets invade Taiwan airspace Good ideas sell themselves, it is only bad ideas that require brute-forcing. The CCP have painted themselves into a corner. The constructive dissonance of insecurity upon which their core ideological self-validation rests obligates them to an expansionist adversarialism that might fit well with their symbolic abstractions of attainment and […]
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Pinker’s War
Steven Pinker is very clever and provides resonant food for thought whenever he speaks or writes anything. The dichotomy of which he is so fond and upon which so much of his work depends – a political turn is never far from a popular work on science in his many compositions – is an instance […]
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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 […]
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Psychological Hypothesis
Psychological and cultural systems of thought, language and belief that promote and nurture a core, selfish egocentrism are simultaneously the most fragile and prone to rapid, irreversible and catastrophic disassembly. There is much to be said here for the overtly pathological aspects of psychological self-identity that become encoded, validated, rewarded and celebrated as orthodox or […]
It is an unacknowledged truth that subjective self-identity is always and already a psychological artefact that exists upon a sliding scale of graduated pathology. A notionally healthy or well-adjusted individual in comparison to a person experiencing some form of dissociative or discontinuous psychological reality represents a difference in degree but not in kind. That is […]
We trade substance, experience and a visceral, lived sense of meaning for a hollow representation of these same things and in finding ourselves dissatisfied and haunted over the transactional deficit of a mechanism that always loses energy and value, we feel quite positively compelled and emotionally motivated to double-down on our losing hand. This is […]
The general arc and trajectory of a pathology is rarely identified or recognised by those that inhabit it; this functional blind-spot is a partial representation of core cognitive factors that exist as much inter as intra individuals and in or as distributed ideologies. Notice, though, that the curious self-organisational resiliency of autonomously self-propagating (and entirely […]
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An Unconscious Truth
Anger almost always reveals an unconscious truth and as a general principle is an agnostic omnipresence across interpersonal and complex (intra- or inter-system) psychological and social dynamics. Extrapolating on this: the generation or cultivation of frictive behaviours or narratives forms the basis and constitutive self-validation of a largely and autonomously self-propagating neurosis. The pathology is […]
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Instagrammatical Narcissism
Instagram is – at base – narcissism, self-obsession, insecurity, pathological inadequacy and the normative, technologically-mediated ubiquity of endless self-surveillance as peer-group pressure on steroids. It’s probably offensive for some people to hear these analytical assessments but, really, that’s ok – it is a part of a core psychological narcissism that the confrontation with and of […]
Partial assertions of self-control are foundational in personality formation but where they find themselves amplified at scale into authoritarian pathologies we witness the birth of profoundly insecure, uncontrollable beasts upon and in which no truly happy life might ever be cultivated.
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The Oscillating Horrors of History
Context: Jonathan P. Baird: Nazi Germany and the fall of law It is a curious property of the dissociative logic and intractable pathology of any extreme ideological position, not just to sweep along compliant and unwitting collaborators who see in the asserted “strength” of their hollow belief system a reflexive framework upon which to hang […]
