Context: Psychology and Deterrence “(…)deterrence strategies often backfire by aggravating a nation’s sense of insecurity, thereby calling forth the very behavior they seek to prevent.” This kind of feedback loop is really quite foundational in the analysis of complex systems, of which strategic standoffs are a salient (and topical) instance. Something which I haven’t (yet) […]
Meanwhile, and as China rapidly prepares to commit geoeconomic suicide, not even they have realised that it is the essential structure of a psychosis to cultivate such an effectively infantile relationship with the world in which the dependency upon confrontation and conquest forms the ideological core of their political narrative of self-identity. Even should they […]
To repeat: The only reason we need smart weapons is because we are too stupid to stop fighting wars.
It is only because we are quite astonishingly and catastrophically unable to end wars that we find ourselves in so very many ways and for so very many different reasons still fighting them. We have refined our sharpest technological insights as a function of conflict and the intertribal dissonance that our species specialises in. What […]
I wonder if these guys would have imagined that the horror they were living through would be repeated again on some European battlefield a little over a hundred years later. The methods and machines may have to some extent changed but the sheer insanity and grinding brutality remain quite the same. Soldiers (and civilians) suffering […]
The looming Global Food Crisis is not solely attributable to the war in Ukraine but there is absolutely no doubt that this conflict represents an accelerating and amplifying factor. We would do well to question the unrepentant stupidity of those who initiate invasions and wars. If starting a wildfire of brutality to leverage the uncertainty […]
Human history primarily self-propagates as a function of its errors. The turbulent dissonance and dissembling confusion of our shared experience and memory generates the optimal transmission medium for change, innovation, evolution and – inevitably – also catastrophe. I was watching a French TV series, Ganglands, just now. It is a fictional portrayal of the essential […]
The relationship between entropy and sustainable continuity in any undertaking resonates with John Boyd’s OODA loop. Indeed, the ability to “get inside” an adversary’s decision loops is quite directly related to the degree and extent of combinatorial entropy they face: information in (as structure, knowledge, order, certainty) is more or less symmetrically equivalent to entropy […]
Imperialist wars such as this are the absurd brutalities upon which intergenerational trauma, reflexive fear and the inevitability of future conflicts are anchored. Putin will one day fade away from the world, leaving behind him only the bitter sorrow and haunting regrets of a broken people, on all sides of whichever borders prevail after this […]
Putin’s relationship with NATO possesses the essential characteristics of a pathological psychosis. He is so profoundly shaped by a narrative of fear and insecurity that he can not imagine (or influence) a world without it. He has in effect done everything in his power to ensure the continuity of the “threat” as reflexive self-validation for […]
I remember a phrase from Marcus Aurelius in which he asserted that the worst thing a person could do is to make themselves and their lives a kind of blemish upon the world. I have been thinking about this in terms of Vladimir Putin. He is certainly inflicting great savagery and brutal abhorrence upon the […]
The curious thing about those who seek to leverage political capital from conflict is that this represents an atavistic ideological “business model” that in such a deeply interdependent world, all actions and aggressions return – amplified – to the actor. Even more so, in such an intricately entangled social, economic and technological context in which […]
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