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
Philosophy

History

Have you noticed that those who make the grandest historical and global assertions of identity and imperialistic might are generally (and self-evidently) driven by the most pitifully base and selfish motivations? In one sense, this is a function of the vast and sprawling networked information and communications systems we inhabit quite naturally and necessarily drifting […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology history Philosophy politics Psychology

Making Monsters

As an authoritarian regime always and implicitly depends for self-validation upon the presence of external and internal threats, where it does not find them it will manufacture them. This is a narcissistic pathology, writ large. The essential and interior psychological surface as self-definition of an individual (or organisational system as political abstraction of nation) is […]

Categories
politics

Dictatorship: Living in Two Worlds

Dictators of course arrive wearing many diverse kinds of masks and singing all manner of simplistic songs of self-interested nationalism. For those of you out there who find themselves living under such a regime, it must be a really strange experience. It is true that we all tend to desensitise to hardship or suffering after […]

Categories
politics

Why Autocratic Regimes Depend on Fear and Insecurity

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 […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Implicit and Hidden Weaknesses of (Digital) Authoritarianism

Context: Strong Yet Brittle: The Risks of Digital Authoritarianism There are quite probable logical and (by extension, mathematical and) distributed material or socioeconomic, not to mention strategic, senses in which a strict adherence to unwavering and inflexible closure and continuity must necessarily create the conditions of inevitable, eventual and/or accelerated structural disassembly or decline. A […]

Categories
culture

A World at War with Itself

At the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, it is a good time to reflect upon where we are all going as a civilisation and what we might plausibly achieve to inhibit, interdict or halt the possibility of any similar global catastrophes from ever occurring again.