Categories
Psychology

Russia, the War, May 9 and a Narrative of Insecurity

There is a core property of human experience that aligns with the reflexive self-validation of narrative cognition. Whatever facts might exist in the world, the structure and cadence of the conversation (and, clearly, of interpreted conflict) has a tendency for better and for worse to exploit behavioural and psychological instinct as bias towards pattern recognition. […]

Categories
history

Totalitarian Psychosis

The totalitarian enigma is that of a psychotic state. The threat of nuclear war is invoked because they have no intellectual or moral substance to and justication for their ideological arguments to support either internal political oppression or external imperalistic aggression. The argument from apocalypse is an act of insanity and even if it is […]

Categories
history

The Totalitarian Enigma

The enigma of the totalitarian state is that it must constantly invoke by provocation precisely those threats and fears that its ideology is founded upon to validate the brute-forced tyrannical exploitation and mobster-kleptocratic oppression of its own people. It is a cycle and spiral of sheer absurdity that would be fascinating to observe as the […]

Categories
politics

The Descent

Paraphrasing what Hemingway wrote on the topic of bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises”, it seems that the descent into totalitarianism occurs first gradually, then suddenly.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

When the Music’s Over

When it is all said and done, this current and potentially Globally catastrophic war, I wonder what will remain? A broken landscape of human suffering as sown seeds for generations of hatred and retribution yet to come? A barren and scarred planetary desert of radioactive futility? A humbled humanity that yet again sailed far too […]

Categories
history

Russian Revolution

It didn’t work out all that well the last time it happened and notwithstanding that nothing is quite so human as the cyclical cadence of recurring ideological catastrophes, but I honestly wonder how long a government can grind their people into the dust of poverty and oppression before they rise up and find their own […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

World Peace

If it were not so utterly catastrophic, this situation would be as fascinating now as it might be to some future generation of historians. The combinatorial entropy as intractable complexity of conflict being what it is, and the perennial failure of institutional language (or individual cognition) to adequately represent (or assert control upon) it, what […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Ukraine Gambit

Having played the game of imperialist anachronism for so very long, I wonder if they might be blind to the extent to which each and every pathological assertion of expansionist control only ever guarantees the eventual and inevitable, plausibly accelerated downstream dissolution of their own state power apparatus. I acknowledge that their political and strategic […]

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

Spinning Democracy: Capitol Insurrection

Context: China, Russia, Iran Spin Capitol Insurrection A note on geopolitical spin: very much like quantum entangled pairs, it exists in a superposition of states – measurement along a particular axis produces the reality. Most instances of perceived weakness can as easily infer strength – it just depends upon which axes of measurement (and narrative) […]

Categories
environment

Policy trumps biodiversity, again.

On discovering that the Government of my country is putting policy (and thus ideology) before environment and refusing to sign a leader’s pledge on biodiversity: Australia joins US, China and Russia in refusing to sign leaders’ pledge on biodiversity  The sophistication required here is at a level of complexity that almost entirely invalidates existing (institutional) […]

Categories
Philosophy

Strategic Blindspots

Context: Colouring Russian views of conflict in the 21st century Positing strategic culture, as are all cultures, as a semantic overlay or usefully-reductive functional self-representation (if even as that which exists unacknowledged or notionally unconscious) of any state is compelling and undoubtedly carries some gravity but such articulate eloquence often masks a fatal analytical flaw. […]