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: United States
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The Cost of Squandering a Superpower
America’s greatest strength was never simply its wealth or military power, but the international relationships that sustained them. As Washington undermines those relationships, the world is learning to become less dependent upon America, with consequences that could be difficult to reverse.
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strait of hormuz
The more instability surrounds the Strait of Hormuz, the more valuable it becomes. The paradox is that a prolonged conflict may be increasing the strategic importance of one of Iran’s most powerful sources of leverage.
Trump reads alliances as costs to cut, missing that they are the distributed, Global infrastructure and constitutive precondition through which American power exists and persists at all.
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Strange Days
What strikes me most about the current president of the United States is a strange inversion that would be almost comic if it were not so consequential. He shows little regard for the role he occupies, scant respect for the law, and no evident commitment to the country beyond what it can deliver to him […]
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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.
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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 […]
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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) […]
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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 […]
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Premonition of Civil War
The underlying momentum of evolving material logics, symmetries and information systems seem already oriented towards incurring dissonance, difference and entropy as an autonomous method through which their own accelerated logical metamorphosis self-propagates.
