Can Russia move on from Putin? I’d say that they have no choice. His business and political model is that of a 13th Century village chieftain. He is seeking to drag his own nation (and the world with it) back into some atavistic absurdity and kleptocratic tyrrany of brutality and darkness. If humanity and creative […]
Putin’s radiating cloud of unknowing (disinformation) serves another purpose. Not only is he seeking to serially mislead the long-suffering peoples of his nation, he is aspiring to ever more closely bind their subjective self-identities to the political fate of his ideological position. If the identities and corollary systems of belief of the people of a […]
I wonder at times if some nations are as dependent upon incompetence as they are upon extreme nationalist rhetoric. The point being that, in this instance, the harmonic resonance of these two emergent (as ideological) character traits has a tendency to endlessly and endemically orient their political system towards the production and self-validation of precisely […]
Is it worth reflecting that the fear and insecurity this event generates within Russia is precisely the bread and butter of authoritarian self-validation. The Kremlin’s leadership has painted itself into to a lonely corner of brutalising isolation, futile alienation and haunted escalatory rhetoric. It has done so precisely because it knows no other way of […]
It is not always immediately obvious but it remains as something of an irreducible fact that the variously self-branded dictators, imperialists and draconian autocrats of this world are really quite unintelligent. Yes, they may have many thousands of very clever individuals, organisations and institutions working on their behalf but the essence of their message and […]
Gullibility has no bounds, particularly when tightly coupled with ultranationalist machismo. The ease and simplicity with which the human dopamine reward system is coopted for nefarious political purposes in really no surprise. A little more than disinformation, the pre-existing sociopsychological symmetries in human behaviour represent templates upon and into which nationalism and imperialist brutality are […]
Concrete evidence that the West does not have a monopoly on gullible fools. The question is, or becomes, are citizens in democracies or in totalitarian regimes more prone to dissociative conspiratorial narratives? Intuition suggests that it may be the totalitarian states that generate more compliant idiots but the greater freedoms of the West leave people […]
An observation on the strategic utility of a “cat’s breakfast” as Ukraine’s harlequin coat of diverse systems and logistical support requirements is that the cost in maintenance and integration is at least partially offset by the complexity that Russian forces must themselves absorb to be able to counter this variety. The second-order consequences of a […]
Putin’s guilt is Russia’s shame. The totalitarian regime in Russia is dependent on ideological throwbacks as atavisms to an ancient world of unsophisticated inter-tribal brutality and ignorance. They have been shaping and preparing their population to participate in (or silently endure) this kind of extravagant savagery for many decades but under Putin the accompanying sociopolitical […]
It is horrifying to think that the Russian regime has painted itself into such a bloody corner that all they can now do is wreak a kind of medieval siege warfare upon the people of Ukraine. Beyond the crude absurdities of narrative symbolism and caricatured historical necessity with which they justify this growing litany of […]
There is a monumental level of incompetence and corruption in the Russian systems of command. I have no political interest and no partisan alignment. This is about humanity. It is an unjust war that is being fought for little more reason than that the insidiously oppressive totalitarian regime is entirely unable to comprehend that if […]
Putin has mastered a political game of Machiavellian command and control, of surveillance and power but he remains quite clearly overwhelmed by the unmanageable complexities of the war he has invoked and inflicted as much upon his own people as upon the peoples of Ukraine and, through them, of the free world. The danger of […]
Daedelus Kite 