The Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism declared victory, and everyone went shopping. Now political instability is a profitable industry, foreign adversaries exploit the machinery, and the race to the bottom has become self-financing.
Tag: Russia
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The Field of War
The overarching domain is the total surface where every system shapes every other, a fused topology forming a singular systems surface in which no boundary is clean and no action is local. It is the ensemble of intersecting, interdependent systemic surfaces whose shifting pressures generate the forces mistaken for, and interpreted as, discrete events. Holism […]
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On Not Pulling the Pin
The recurring tension over Taiwan is often described as a clash of policies, alliances, red lines or historical claims. But at a structural level it behaves more like a maintained gradient in a communicative field. Large national identities do not simply persist by consensus or memory. They require articulated vectors – directions of tension that […]
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l.c.d. dictation
It’s not always obvious, but it’s grimly consistent: most dictators and autocrats aren’t clever—they’re just willing to be cruel. A few have enough low cunning to seize a moment or twist a system, but intelligence isn’t the driver. It’s laziness, brutality, and the fact that violence is the fastest shortcut to power if you don’t […]
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Peace
When reduced to its essence, the simplicity of global conflict is as horrifying as it is absurd.
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Autocratic Bitcoin?
Context: More Dangerous’ Than Nukes—China And Russia Revealed To Be Suddenly Abandoning The U.S. Dollar For A Bitcoin, Ethereum And XRP-Inspired Rival Amid Crypto Price Pump. A cunning plan. I’m going to suggest that self-inflicted existential desperation makes strange bedfellows of technologies and autocrats. The strangest of all being the expected benefits of socioeconomic, cultural […]
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Extraterrestrial Treaty
The first nation to engage in a treaty to leverage a learning relationship with an extraterrestrial civilisation shall likely find themselves so vastly overwhelmed by intelligence, technology and (all associated, downstream) complexity that they might later wish they had simply stayed in a cave sharpening the pointy sticks with which humans are so prone to […]
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 […]
Armageddon is in the news just now – how strange to have a word which invokes the end of all meanings, a system of belief that renders all belief as void and an Imperialist state that unwittingly seeks to atomise all kingdoms, all kings. The gullibility of people never ceases to amaze me and yet […]
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Totalitarian Regime
The borders and boundaries as definitions and shared narratives which define us become even more valuable and important when they are perceived as under threat. The totalitarian political playbook begins (and ends) with the fabrication and cultivation of profoundly insecure borders, boundaries and differences that allow them to masquerade as strength and certainty, to play […]
Context: ‘The Russians have started coming’: Finland considers tourist visa ban The curious thing about the autocratic regime reacting negatively to other nations taking rational actions against them (and their war) is that for all their sabre rattling and vigorous external finger-pointing, the difference and opposition they are creating is precisely the dissonance and turbulent […]
