The whole sorry mess of this conflict strikes me as a psychological (as much as ideological) pathology that endlessly reproduces itself, not as a function or measure of its successes but as the heroic recharacterisation (as you reflect, above) of its failures and suffering. It is perhaps a little like a gyroscope that follows its […]
The gambler’s fallacy that doubling down on a bad bet will eventually recoup lost investments can be offset by realising a longer-term payoff in terms of territorial influence and power. Other than feeling a bit melancholy about the oppressed and serially, strategically misled and economically exploited peoples of these nations, I can not help but […]
Imagine, if you will, a king. A mighty ruler, a keen follower of Machiavelli and thus feared much more than loved and very clever indeed. Of course, being clever is only ever measured by the breadth and depth in which intelligence is defined and this king had come to live in a half-mirrored world of […]
A terrible mistake is about to be made in Ukraine. It is an act of anachronistic imperialism and thoughtless brutality to seek to invade another nation under a masquerade of being “one people” when the reciprocal costs to one’s own (actual) people are going to be so staggeringly vast and unrelenting. This is fundamentally a […]
Situation: Political Leader A is threatening to invade Country B for asserted reasons of historical justice, retribution, pride or security. Explanation: Political Leader A is threatening to invade Country B in order to keep their own people in line. Creating a sense of fear and insecurity is a way to make people feel like they […]
Context: AI Will Hack Our Brains, Expert Says Can we shape the use, value and utility of Big Data and AI in ways which benefit humanity? I am not entirely pessimistic but pragmatic realism invokes both caution and trepidation here. Ethics. A definition of “good use of data” is subject to considerable ethical uncertainty and […]
Context: Brave new Netherlands: This Dutch AI start-up is changing healthcare Michel Foucault‘s observations on the role and nature of surveillance and knowledge were quite on point in regards to this. The nature of a disciplinary/regulatory and /or cybernetic system of social control is such that what occurs in health quickly permeates and percolates through […]
It is fascinating that human beings are in general so fixated upon provisioning plausible or compelling ontologies (of “how things are”) that they quite happily trade away their own conceptual creativity and intellectual aptitude for the lean pickings of effectively fictive narratives that rarely if ever meet anything like the lofty ambitions towards which they […]
It is not all but certainly many if not most men that seek to make little gods of themselves. In so doing, they seek to be praised and treasured but when this fails to occur they generally set about conquering their world, their families and (the extended family of) their nations as some immodest compensation […]
Power is really an inverse function of ethics. What is considered permissible or (indeed) valuable under any moving ethical frame of reference is implicitly – some would argue necessarily – representative of the power structures, systems and integrated social, political and ideological modalities of a time and place. Notice also that what is considered good […]
The greatest irony of every instance of civilisation collapse has probably never been that it comes without warning or time to avert impending catastrophe, as even then when disaster looms it is never entirely unexpected or unforeseen by those bearing sufficient intellect to observe its impending arrival. It is much more likely that we will […]
The mystery of this “power of the collective” is not in the overt presence or tidal, cultural and narrative-psychological force it compels. It is in the many and diverse ways that individuals bound together by information, communication and shared experience or role find themselves as bearers of a meaning and a message which is hardly […]
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