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Philosophy

Conflict as Communication

It is precisely because conflict is a kind of communication that it persists so far beyond the infancy of our species. Artefacts and entities of communication remain in this world for as long as they do through the many ways they endlessly reproduce themselves both through and as us. War, fear and hatred perennially percolate […]

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Philosophy

War

War is a widow, an orphan, a dusty grave and a lonely field of grief and sorrow. Image: stable diffusion.

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Philosophy

Evil

When encountering the serially haunted futility of so much of our species’ belligerently selfish behavioural vocabulary, I often resort to an attempted witty quip to the effect that this is, yet again and quite simply, “human beings being human”. It is not after all as though most who conduct themselves in variously disgraceful ways have […]

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Philosophy

Troglodyte Dictators

It is not always immediately obvious but it remains as something of an irreducible fact that the variously self-branded dictators, imperialists and draconian autocrats of this world are really quite unintelligent. Yes, they may have many thousands of very clever individuals, organisations and institutions working on their behalf but the essence of their message and […]

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Philosophy

Democratic hetereogeneity is the winning gambit against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

An observation on the strategic utility of a “cat’s breakfast” as Ukraine’s harlequin coat of diverse systems and logistical support requirements is that the cost in maintenance and integration is at least partially offset by the complexity that Russian forces must themselves absorb to be able to counter this variety. The second-order consequences of a […]

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Philosophy

Automated Technological Malevolence

Context: Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code Exponentiation… it’s a language game, all of it. The hyper-inflating state space of all combinatorial possibility has a tendency to drift, through entropy, into precisely those transient structural constellations that maximally reproduce: • not only the elements and instances or references, idioms, sentences, logical fragments and […]

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communication

Disinformation Wars

In a distributed, ubiquitous information space, everything (including this brief paragraph) is in play. While it is true that complex communications systems can (and do) have many centers of gravity, some of the interesting considerations here orbit a fact that the ascendant networks and platforms of information transmission maximally persist as a function of replicability, […]

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Alien Anthropology

Putin’s Fear

Last night I dreamed of Putin’s death. We might well ask how the life of one man is anchored upon the death of so many others, how the privileged wealth and power of a few are the necessary conditions for the desperate poverty of so many, and how the world yet again finds itself staring […]

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Philosophy

Disinformation and Propaganda: Living Lies and Midas’ Curse

In attempting to shape and influence the world through chaos and confusion, the Russian establishment and state media have themselves become both transmission medium and primary victims of these “active measures”. In trying to leverage and exploit lies, uncertainty and doubt – the totalitarian state has itself become the primary target and victim of these […]

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Philosophy

Atavism, Warfare and Cruelty

Putin’s guilt is Russia’s shame. The totalitarian regime in Russia is dependent on ideological throwbacks as atavisms to an ancient world of unsophisticated inter-tribal brutality and ignorance. They have been shaping and preparing their population to participate in (or silently endure) this kind of extravagant savagery for many decades but under Putin the accompanying sociopolitical […]

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Philosophy

Siege Warfare in Europe

It is horrifying to think that the Russian regime has painted itself into such a bloody corner that all they can now do is wreak a kind of medieval siege warfare upon the people of Ukraine. Beyond the crude absurdities of narrative symbolism and caricatured historical necessity with which they justify this growing litany of […]

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Philosophy

Resistance

There is a monumental level of incompetence and corruption in the Russian systems of command. I have no political interest and no partisan alignment. This is about humanity. It is an unjust war that is being fought for little more reason than that the insidiously oppressive totalitarian regime is entirely unable to comprehend that if […]