Categories
history

The Arc of Autocracy always ends in Ashes

Vladimir Putin is unrepentant in his ways and I doubt that anyone will ever change such a power hungry despot. All those who surround him and enable this reign of terror over their own nation might do very well to question what will happen in a few years when he becomes old, withers and fades […]

Categories
Philosophy

Territorial Insecurities, Taiwan Edition

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Irrationality is Endemic

Context: Logical Fallacies Curiously, though, logical fallacies have a largely unacknowledged and arguably pivotal role to play in the successfully sustainable continuity of cultural (as much as cognitive) communications systems. What is inaccurate or even outright absurd often carries more information entropy and influence than that which is, strictly speaking, factual or true. It is […]

Categories
culture

Beautiful Words and Emptiness

I enjoy the endless Baroque complexity of words far too much to ever settle on a generalised shape or articulated pattern and causal ontology for them. Of course, though, even the absence of pattern is a kind of pattern, no? By this logic we might even assert that the intricate improbability of a truly random […]

Categories
Philosophy

Poetry

Poetry is, of course, the original form of a language, any language, and in the simple articulation of a spoken word approximates to that ancient world in which every sound and every meaning was imbued with magic and mystery or the miraculous unknowing of an infant’s innocent mind as humanity itself that sees and hears […]

Categories
Philosophy

Panopticon

All inner lives are effective introspection as self-inflected augmentation of perceived external eyes or minds and expectations. It is the value-judgement or criticality (and even, rarely, admiration) that billows and swirls as complex blossoms inside us. Those borrowed drops of liquid Other’s minds or seamless perception might like toxic ink pollute the crystal clear of […]

Categories
life

Galaxies of Light: Civilisation, Entropy and the Blood-Dimmed Tide

Civilisation is as easily unwound as it is woven and when the unweaving overtakes the making, when the diffuse entropy and structural disassembly outpaces the aggregate capacity for humanity to innovate fast enough, the world falls apart. It will take profound humanity, compassion and intellect to resolve the darker futures we are facing and being […]

Categories
culture

The Postman died from a Broken Heart

What makes a beautiful story is often not so much that part of the narrative that is obvious and visible to the eye – like the tip of an iceberg – but rather all those depths that remain unseen, unknown and unsaid. Sometimes the back-story is even more powerful than the story itself and raises […]

Categories
Philosophy

Beauty and Impossibility

Looking into such a beautiful face, it brings to mind all the lives I have lived, all the dreams that I followed in some alternate reality, and all the lives that I will never, can never, live. It is as though all of these dreams, aspirations and desires have followed every possible path and configuration […]

Categories
culture music poetry

Rap Wars: Mortality and Media Accountability

I recently saw the biopic “Notorious” which portrays the life of rapper Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. “The Notorious B.I.G.“). I have always been a little indifferent to rap and rap-culture but it was interesting to discover one interpretation of what happened in a famous conflict between rapper Tupac Shakur and “Biggie” the final result of which […]