Categories
Philosophy

Trump

Shared, directed and manipulated dissociative delusions of grandeur or competency follow quite naturally from a world in which endless tides of abbreviated technologically-mediated superficialities are in ascendancy. If it wasn’t him in this role, it would have quite probably (and eventually) been someone just like him. What is of far more interest than that a […]

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
politics

2020 US Election: Democratic Entropy

We might all be quite surprised to one day discover that dissonance and entropy are irreducible properties of systems of social organisation, that the sustainable continuity of any socio-political (or economic) system is only ever really a measure of the extent to which it successfully negotiates this internal dissonance and/or offsets and displaces it as […]

Categories
Philosophy

Problems of Constitutional Democracy

Watching the information bonfire of the current US election processes is troubling, to say the least. Beyond external interference in the fidelity of democracy and the internal dissonance of a nation being in many ways torn apart by incessant adversarial posturing and partisan self-interest, there is in this situation an instance of some broader unresolved […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Healing America: not so simple…

A key problem: information and communication systems autonomously self-replicate by optimally-concise pattern encoding methods as an extended consequence of the orientation towards low-energy states. No surprise there, perhaps, for anyone versed in complexity theory but the problem is not necessarily the intractable antitheses by binary poles in this endless partisan argument so much as the […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Populism, Authoritarianism and Cults of Personality

Context: The CCP’s Official Journal Falls in Line with Xi Jinping’s Cult of Personality As a more general philosophical observation agnostic of specific contexts (including -isms or persons), human beings are subject to reflexive psychological imprinting of a sort that leads us to cultivate these fantasies and fictions of triumphant great leaders as an inadvertent […]

Categories
politics

The Disunited States of America

Context: Republican plan could embed destructive US foreign policy What a curious world this is where the aesthetic ambiguities of political self-interest are quite prepared to embrace such dissociative pathologies (and personalities) as would have shamed their forebears into abject silence. In some ways we might assert that this is symptomatic of a historical moment […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Facebook might also Dump Trump but the Fakes are here to stay

Context: Facebook staffers walk out saying Trump’s posts should be reined in It is interesting to reflect that, shameless Executive bloviation notwithstanding, information and communications technologies from (for instance) Lascaux through emojis have never really been about truth and falsity so much as they have been about naked self-replication of the encoded system they bear. […]

Categories
politics

Twitter Tests Trump’s Tall Tales

Context: Trump threatens social media after Twitter puts warning on his false claims The dissonant entropy of salient adversarialism finds optimal self-replication through staccato bursts of semi-coherent linguistic superficiality and Twitter is a weapon of choice.  If the primary medium of transmission could even plausibly be extinguished, an entire operating model and communications strategy (such […]

Categories
culture

The Self-Propagating Logical Hyper-Inflation of Media, Information and Mass Communications

A certain talent for inflammatory monosyllabic rhetoric and self-aggrandising histrionics might never have percolated up through the selection processes of liberal democracy had these qualities not already been a greater part and functional necessity of the political game…

Categories
culture politics systems

Trumping conspiracy: On NOT Turning History into toilet paper…

A national Executive unfurling inarticulate and episodic errors of judgement and failures of intelligence like ragged, torn and soiled toilet paper across history’s grand cartography…

Categories
culture

Global Conflict: The End of History ?

If we can’t find ways to agree, perhaps we can find less unhealthy ways to maintain the disagreements by which we seem to so vicariously define ourselves…