Categories
Philosophy

On a Wheel

Cultural processing of information is one of the main tasks we carry out. It is costly and can be very difficult. Our brains are on one hand dedicated to the maintenance and sustainable continuity of the bodily vessels that support them but also must process the symbolic complexity required to sustain the systems of culture […]

Categories
freedom

On the Freedom of Women in Iran

The essence of all totalitarian regimes is that of the brutal oppression of their own people by any and all possible methods. The violent oppression of women in particular has a leading place in this current litany of relentless attrocities. The Iranian regime is grounded in and sustained by its pathological obsession with the control […]

Categories
culture

The Achilles’ Heel of Totalitarian Adversarialism

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Better Words, Better Worlds

Watching the ramshackle parade and rickety cart of human civilisation bumping and bumbling along the deep corrugations of this muddy dirt track (of history) that it has never quite managed to effectively transcend, I am struck much less by the cyclical percolation of idiots and tyrants to positions of power than I am that we […]

Categories
humanity

The Spiral of F̶e̶a̶r Peace

The spiral of accelerating attention upon aggressive events and negative consequences has a tendency to reproduce itself much faster than positive, neutral or ideologically and geopolitically inconsequential acts and facts. Human brains are, for better and for worse, more precisely refined and tuned to react to (and obsess upon) the terrible possibilities and through it, […]

Categories
Philosophy

Conflict, Hope, Identity

Key problems appear to be the degree and extent to which brains (as though pattern-recognition savants) are so willingly bewitched by the structure of an argument as a sufficient reason to believe in its validity. The psychologically reflexive experience of an argument or conceptual constellation tends to reproduce epistemological subjectivity in ways biased towards structure […]

Categories
Philosophy

Autocracy is Addicted to Fear

We all know that the mobster kleptocracy has been catastrophically miscalculating at least in part due to a narrative dependency of getting high on its own supply of disinformation but in the monumental strategic blunder that this invasion represents they display the kernel core of a neurotic psychological pathology. An implicit orientation towards the positive […]

Categories
Peace

Fools rush in… (stop the war)

Fools rush in but only the insane choose to stay. Only a fool or a madman, finding themselves stuck deep in a hole of their own making and desperate to make a catastrophic failure seem less terrible then proceeds to dig a much bigger and more disastrous hole around themselves. I very much doubt that […]

Categories
life

The End

A feeling of synchronicity. A flash of light and a howling wind. Fire, darkness, confusion. Screaming, suffering, burning, crushing and chaos. A metallic taste and cells being slowly cooked from the inside by radioactive fallout. Oblivion and forgetting. My greatest fear has always been this horror. Not because I will cease to exist although no […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom from Self

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: freedom is not of self, it is from self. The boundaries and borders by and through which we define and cultivate our selves are also and quite counter-intuitively the shackles and chains that bind us. It is something of a paradox – the more we […]

Categories
Philosophy

Damocles

The essence of a human life is in so many ways its natural orientation towards anything and everything other than death, negation, extinction and the oblivion of forgetting or of being forgotten and yet so many of our actions, behaviours and mental abstractions lead and leave us so perilously close to the abyss. There is […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

World Peace

If it were not so utterly catastrophic, this situation would be as fascinating now as it might be to some future generation of historians. The combinatorial entropy as intractable complexity of conflict being what it is, and the perennial failure of institutional language (or individual cognition) to adequately represent (or assert control upon) it, what […]