Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]
Tag: war
Context: Chinese jets invade Taiwan airspace Good ideas sell themselves, it is only bad ideas that require brute-forcing. The CCP have painted themselves into a corner. The constructive dissonance of insecurity upon which their core ideological self-validation rests obligates them to an expansionist adversarialism that might fit well with their symbolic abstractions of attainment and […]
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Ideology as History
It is worth noting that the pathological certainty with which tyrants assert their possession of singular truth and privileged certainty is really no less than the driving dissonance from which all human history endlessly retreats. This turbulent misanthropy compels us forward and endlessly regenerates precisely those forms of psychological and cultural insecurity which produce tyrants […]
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On Darkness, Guilt and Conflict
The extent to which psychoanalysis is a successful or compelling theory is really a very interesting question in and of itself, even before considering its subject matter. This same dark thread was identified by Nietzsche as being a symptom of more distributed belief-system neuroses. Regardless of where, when or how anyone asserts the causal factors […]
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Why does humanity keep fighting wars?
It is because they are gullible, insecure and easily deceived. The expansionist empire-building of any nation is only ever an inverse function of the doubt and fragile uncertainty upon which they have been built. The proof of this is not difficult to determine – notice that every adversarial and belligerent gesture only ever serves to […]
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All the little gods…
It is not all but certainly many if not most men that seek to make little gods of themselves. In so doing, they seek to be praised and treasured but when this fails to occur they generally set about conquering their world, their families and (the extended family of) their nations as some immodest compensation […]
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Nuclear War? Nope.
Context: US Military Document Admits That Risk of Nuclear War Is Growing This article kind of ruined my Sunday, right there. The rank absurdity of nuclear war is astonishing. That the worlds and words built from effective abstractions of thought and the transient emotional affectations of partisan ideological difference could ever arrive in or at […]
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Extinction
Context: Early humans were sheltered from worst effects of volcanic supereruption Human culture is in effect a shared memory and transient security blanket that rarely sees (or reflexively, defensively – chooses to see) very far past the half-mirrored, labyrinthine self-reflection that a dream-like consensus reality and the hyper-extended cognition of technology must always and ultimately […]
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Kessler Syndrome
The Kessler Syndrome is a clear and stark reminder of just how intransigently daft the militarisation of space might eventually prove itself to be. One idiot with a missile and LEO indefinitely inaccessible for everyone. No less painful than the consequences of even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons (anywhere) but, if you noticed, the […]
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The Movie that Ruined my Life
Showing my age here, but when I was a teenager I saw a movie that completely ruined my life. The Day After was a 1983 drama that illustrated the immediate consequences of nuclear war. It was such a singularly depressing experience that I really don’t think I have ever been the same since. Perhaps it […]
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War
Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]
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Dark Star
It’s true that evolution proceeds iteratively and adds layer upon layer of complex utility to bodies, brains and to the disembodied behavioural systems recorded in and as culture or language and technology. Notice, however, that there is a certain threshold of confirmation and communication complexity at which entire nations, civilisations find themselves reverting to baser […]
