Theirs is a role play of analysis, simply and unwittingly giftwrapping populist-adjacent themes for broad public consumption; little on insight, big on performative role play.
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aussie media fail
Tag: political theatre
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populism down under
The appeal of populism is that it makes complexity feel unnecessary. The cost is usually discovered much later.
Australia’s political speed-dating with One Nation suggests that what has happened in the USA is not an exception, it is a franchised political method.
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political theatre
One Nation raised millions for political theatre while a Queensland hospice had to beg for palliative care funding. This is clearly ridiculous but is also hardly an isolated incident of misplaced priorities and dodgy reasoning in sociopolitical systems.
Having watched the world’s most powerful nation fall backwards into the plumbing of populist discontent, Australia now seems oddly determined to follow.
Malakacene: the long historical moment in which technologically mediated societies stopped selecting primarily for competence, wisdom, restraint, and institutional responsibility, and instead became increasingly vulnerable to the rapid propagation of spectacle, grievance, aggression, narcissism, and performative certainty masquerading as leadership.
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An American Error
Enter a Chorus, beholding the Republic as a cracked glass. Behold the man, not monster, but a mirror, Wherein an age, long sick yet self-amazed, Doth spy its own deformity and cry, “Lo, greatness!” He is no thunderbolt from heaven cast, But weather bred within the common air: Distrust made flesh, grievance given tongue, Ambition […]
Populist symbolism travels by detaching feeling from place, consequence, and thought, then giving borrowed socio-psychological anxiety the dissimulating smoke and mirrors of a theatrical political and identity performance.
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Everyday Exasperation: Traumatic Tyrrany
Most people, across most periods of history, have lived less under grand political visions than under a weary determination to survive whichever charlatan, tyrant, or narcissist happens to drift into power at a given moment and in a given place. Populations are carried along in different ways. Some are swept up in the intoxication of […]
Daedelus Kite 