Implicit and endemic grey-zone ambiguities mean that this might never be attributed to anything other than (yet) another heartlessly self-serving criminal enterprise that is leveraging the inflated value of hospitals and health data during a public health crisis. I expect there are some logical and legal hurdles in defining acts of war this way. Not […]
Tag: war
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Nuclear Weapons are Stupid
Context: Bombs and the Bikini Atoll I recently saw an interview with US Gen (ret.) Colin Powell discussing this technology. His assessment seems to be accurate – these weapons are so powerful and of such vast consequence that they are effectively and completely useless. If any one side or warhead-or-sabre-rattling power were to launch a […]
Context: Oakland, Portland sue over use of federal agents at protests A generally irreducible property of pathological ideologies, context and partisan-agnostic – in as much as any assertion can ever now be, is that they work industriously (and just as often unconsciously) towards the recreation of the circumstances that validate their insecurity and the actions […]
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Fighting for Peace?
I am really quite endlessly fascinated by the many ways that these political, cultural and spiritual traditions (both near and far in time and space, it must be said) become so readily or easily detached from their original motives and inspirations to become quite the opposite of their intended or asserted goals and often become […]
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Global Conflict: Time to Grow Up
While it may be low-hanging fruit and all references to it may be quite akin to stating the bleeding obvious, there is a distinct lack of unity in the world: wars, political dissonance, conflict, sabre-rattling and a thousand different flavours of internecine anger or paranoid fear. What might be somewhat less obvious in such an […]
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Seeking Peace: Nothing really matters…
It may be something of a truism that to understand war, one must first understand peace. It is of a similar kind of statement to assert the inverse – that to understand peace, one must first understand war. What then of attempting to understand the unified totality of conflict and harmony? When inspecting the unified […]
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The Extinction of Humanity?
You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
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Partisan Pathology
There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]
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War and Peace
There is an irreducible enigma in the aspiration to peace through structured, ordered methods. Every structure, system, taxonomy, ontology and patterned application of rationality or logic to complex problems always (ALWAYS) becomes another component in the hyper-inflating, combinatorial reference space of the problem that is being addressed – in language, law or perception. Each new […]
Notice how, if we are conceptually and cognitively able to step back and observe the forest rather than the trees, that the primary information system function here is that of the recursive self-propagation of soliton-like, continuously self-propagating waveforms in patterns of behaviour and thought. Those artefacts that are produced at times of duress and stress, […]
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Philosophy of War
Wilfrid Sellars characterised the aim of philosophy “(…) abstractly formulated, (…) to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. The foundational discontinuity of history and in our current Global “civilisation” (such as it is) that leads us into endlessly futile internecine […]
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Language Divides Us Against Ourselves
There are senses in which the act of definition and assertion of epistemological necessity or structure upon any context, evidence or experience is already (in a limited sense) an act of violence, of difference and disassembly. Our taxonomies and lexicons are in many ways not of the world so much as they are forced upon […]
Daedelus Kite 