Categories
cybernetics

After Trump

If the United States survives Trump, there is a genuine possibility of reconstruction, but only because damage exposes the relationships that mattered and brings hidden dependencies into the open, revealing how the system was actually held together. The damage being inflicted is real and severe, economic and political at once. Disruption to institutions, markets, and […]

Categories
Philosophy

Unhinged Banality and Myopic Jingoism

It is as fascinating as it is tragic. We may do well to question the eternal recurrence of unhinged banality and myopic jingoism as there are causal mechanisms in play. It is only incidentally about personalities: probability, entropy and adaptive statistical factors occupy the center of gravity. What percolates to ascendance tends to be those […]

Categories
politics

After Trump

At some point, Trump will be gone. The man will vanish from the stage, but the field that made him possible will remain. That’s the real danger—confusing the collapse of a figure with the collapse of the system that sustained them. Without structural change, the vacancy will simply pull another body into the same orbit. […]

Categories
politics

An Idiot’s Mandate

From outside the United States, the Republican Party’s collapse into moral and intellectual bankruptcy is not just a domestic farce—it’s a global hazard. They’ve thrown their weight behind Donald Trump, a conman who turns every institution he touches into a casino of self-interest and spectacle. This isn’t leadership; it’s theatre for idiots, and the actors […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Watching the World burn

The world’s on fire and everyone’s selling marshmallows. I’m sitting here, half in disbelief, half in deja vu, watching the carnival of catastrophe roll on like it’s just another Tuesday. People are making obscene amounts of money monetising distraction, denial, and dopamine, while whole populations are quietly erased beneath the algorithmic rug. It’s not just […]

Categories
Philosophy

Presidential Patsy

We tend to fixate on the rise of misanthropes—as though selfishness were some aberration rather than a predictable by-product of a system driven by commercial imperative. But the deeper concern is structural: the ease with which sprawling, intricate bureaucracies can be repurposed, nudged, or tilted into autocratic shapes. That this is possible suggests not merely […]

Categories
politics

Pluralism, Quo Vadis

Pluralism, as an ideal, rests on the assumption of epistemic generosity—the belief that all perspectives contribute to a richer, more complete understanding of the world. But in practice, it suffers from a kind of entropic drag. Not all ideas refine the discourse; some degrade it, introducing noise, bad faith, or outright hostility to coherence itself. […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

US 2024 Election

“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round…” The 2024 US election is an interesting historical inflection point, quite clearly bordering on hysterical in some regards. The fuel of both political continuity and change is stochastic difference, not unity – a tough pill to swallow. A simple enough concept and yet rendered as almost […]

Categories
politics

Presidential Debate

Nothing quite so succinctly captures the cultural spectacle and general media Zeitgeist of jousting ideological anachronisms than does the symbolic Greco-Roman wrestling match of a contemporary Presidential political debate. Quite agnostic of personal political and/or philosophical systems of belief, I am worried by the vacuum of integrity and character on display. Having an opinion has […]

Categories
politics

The Sleep of Reason

Is America sleepwalking into tyrrany? El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Context: How far would Trump go? I’m really very grateful that I live in a democracy that is not, currently at least, painfully and publicly disassembling itself.

Categories
politics

Donald Trump is an Accident of History

Assuring democratic continuity may be problematised by the presence of this particular political personality in ways that (perhaps necessarily) distract us from tackling underlying causal factors. If it wasn’t this problematic character, it would be someone else and regardless of how this situation plays out; what are the large-scale causal dynamics here? Is the demagogic […]

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) […]